Introduction

More than a hundred years of mutually beneficial commerce relations between Britain and Argentina, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, established an enclave of English-speaking people in Argentina that reached a peak of 28,300 (Cortes Conde 2000) in 1914. While there is little data that differentiates the regional origins of the flow of immigrants, except for a well-known Welsh enclave in Patagonia, the main bulk of the flow were middle-class merchants of mostly English origin who worked in the meat-packing and railroad industries and settled in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires. Creating their own newspaper, hospitals, schools, churches and clubs, the enclave remained relatively isolated from the host country language and culture until 1950. Due to Britain's economic decline and economic relations between the two countries coming to a near stop, many of the immigrants returned to Britain, with the Anglo-Argentine community halving in size to 17,500 by 1976 (Graham-Yooll 1981). This number has remained relatively stable in the last thirty years, a time marked by a greater amount of cultural and linguistic contact with the Argentinian population. From this tracing of the English-speaking people in Argentina, this chapter describes the sociolinguistic history and some phonetic characteristics of this little-known variety of Southern Hemisphere English.

The rise of the community

The immigration of English-speaking peoples to Latin America started in the early seventeenth century, but a more stabilized establishment came when these colonized countries obtained independence from either Spain or Portugal, and ‘the region opened up to overseas trade and investment’ (Marshall 2000: xvii).