Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What language is spoken in Buenos Aires?
Buenos Aires is a multicultural city, being home to multiple ethnic and religious groups. Several languages are spoken in the city in addition to Spanish, contributing to its culture and the dialect spoken in the city and in some other parts of the country. This is because in the last 150 years the city, and the country in general, has been a major recipient of millions of immigrants from all over the world, making it a melting pot where several ethnic groups live together and being considered as one of the most diverse cities of the Americas.
The Buenos Aires Underground (locally known as "subte", from ""subterráneo"" meaning underground or subway), is a high-yield system providing access to various parts of the city. Opened in 1913, it is the oldest underground system in the Southern Hemisphere and oldest in the Spanish-speaking world. The system has six underground lines and one overground line, named by letters (A to E, and H) and there are 100 stations, and of route, including the Premetro line. An expansion program is underway to extend existing lines into the outer neighborhoods and add a new north-south line. Route length is expected to reach by 2011.
'The Buenos Aires Standard ("Estandarte de Buenos Aires", earlier The Standard or River Plate News or Buenos Ayres Standard) was an English language newspaper published in Buenos Aires between 1861 and 1959. It was founded by the brothers Michael Mulhall and Edward Thomas Mulhall and claimed to be the first English-language daily newspaper in the southern hemisphere. It became the oldest and most respected English newspaper in South America.
A significant source on the history of Argentina, it is being digitised and placed online by the Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina.
The tallest buildings in Argentina are primarily residential and are almost all located in Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital city and a major metropolitan area within South America. Most of the buildings were completed after 2000, with some notable exceptions being the Kavanagh building, an Art Deco skyscraper completed in 1936, and the Alas Building, commissioned by President Juan Perón in 1950 and completed in the late 1950s.
Latin America ( or "Latinoamérica"; ; ) is the region of the Americas where Romance languages (i.e., those derived from Latin)—particularly Spanish and Portuguese, as well as French—are primarily spoken.
Finally, there are words that are derived from others in Spanish, such as the verb "abarajar", which means to stop a situation or a person (such as "to stop your opponent's blows with the blade of your knife") and is related to the verb "barajar", which means to cut or shuffle a deck of cards.
Since the 1970s, it is a matter of debate whether newer additions to the slang of Buenos Aires qualify as lunfardo. Traditionalists argue that lunfardo "must" have a link to the argot of the old underworld, to tango lyrics, or to racetrack slang. Others maintain that the colloquial language of Buenos Aires is lunfardo by definition.
In 1887, the federal district was enlarged by the annexation of the towns (partidos) of Belgrano and Flores.
Belgranodeutsch or Belgrano-Deutsch is a mixture of German and Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, specifically in the neighborhood of Belgrano.
According to the government of Catalonia, Spanish, locally known as Castilian, is currently the most spoken language in Catalonia (45.9% daily users of Spanish vs. 35.6% daily users of Catalan vs. 11% daily users of both Spanish and Catalan) and especially in the Barcelona metropolitan area, as well as native language and usual language of many Catalan citizens. This language is widely prevalent in the press, cinema and in daily life.
Rio de Janeiro City is home to more than 6 million people, accounting for about 35% of the population of Rio de Janeiro State. Portuguese remains the most widely spoken language and Rio de Janeiro is the second city in the Portuguese speaking world.
Spanish is spoken by about 90% of the country's population. In Nicaragua the Voseo form is common, just as in other countries in Central and South America like Honduras, Argentina, Uruguay or coastal Colombia. Spanish has many different dialects spoken throughout Latin America, Central American Spanish is the dialect spoken in Nicaragua. In the Caribbean coast many afro-Nicaraguans and creoles speak English and creole English as their first language. Also in the Caribbean coast, many Indigenous people speak their native languages, such as the Miskito, Sumo, Rama and Garifuna language. In addition, many ethnic groups in Nicaragua, such as the Chinese Nicaraguans and Palestinian Nicaraguans, have maintained their ancestral languages, which are minority languages, while also speaking Spanish and/or English. These minority languages include Chinese, Arabic, German, and Italian, among others.
In 1492, the arrival of Christopher Columbus on a Castilian-paid expedition paved the way for the Spanish colonization of the Americas. As a result of this process, most countries in South America now speak the same language as Castile. Until about the eighteenth century, the Kingdom of Castile, and not Spain as a whole, was the colonizing power, and the language used was called "castellano". Thus, some Latin American countries formerly under Spanish rule have retained the custom of calling it "castellano", while others eventually switched to calling it "español", with many different factors influencing the final choice.
According to the linguistic census held by the Government of Catalonia in 2013, Spanish is the most spoken language in Catalonia (46.53% claim Spanish as "their own language"), followed by Catalan (37.26% claim Catalan as "their own language"). In everyday use, 11.95% of the population claim to use both languages equally, whereas 45.92% mainly use Spanish and 35.54% mainly use Catalan. There is a significant difference between the Barcelona metropolitan area (and, to a lesser extent, the Tarragona area), where Spanish is more spoken than Catalan, and the more rural Catalonia, where Catalan clearly prevails over Spanish.
The development of Portuguese in Brazil (and consequently in the rest of the areas where Portuguese is spoken) has been influenced by other languages with which it has come into contact, mainly in the lexicon: first the Amerindian languages of the original inhabitants, then the various African languages spoken by the slaves, and finally those of later European and Asian immigrants. Although the vocabulary is still predominantly Portuguese, the influence of other languages is evident in the Brazilian lexicon, which today includes, for example, hundreds of words of Tupi–Guarani origin referring to local flora and fauna; numerous West African Yoruba words related to foods, religious concepts, and musical expressions; and English terms from the fields of modern technology and commerce. Although some of these words are more predominant in Brazil, they are also used in Portugal and other countries where Portuguese is spoken.
The main public transport in major cities is the bus. Many cities also have a diverse system of metro and subway trains, the first of which was the Buenos Aires subte, opened 1913. The Santiago subway is the largest network in South America, with 103 km, while the São Paulo subway is the largest in transportation, with more than 4.6 million passengers per day and was voted the best in the Americas. In Rio de Janeiro was installed the first railroad of the continent, in 1854. Today the city has a vast and diversified system of metropolitan trains, integrated with buses and subway. Recently it was also inaugurated in the city a Light Rail System called VLT, a small electrical trams at low speed, while São Paulo inaugurated its monorail, the first of South America. In Brazil, an express bus system called Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which operates in several cities, has also been developed.
Worldwide, English is used widely as a lingua franca and can be seen to be the dominant language at this time. The world's largest language by native speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is a first language of around 960 million people, or 12.44% of the population, predominantly in Greater China. Spanish is spoken by around 330 to 400 million people, predominantly in the Americas and Spain. Arabic is spoken by around 280 million people. Bengali is spoken by around 250 to 300 million people worldwide, predominantly in Bangladesh and India. Hindi is spoken by about 200 million speakers, mostly in India. Portuguese is spoken by about 230 million speakers in Portugal, Brazil, East Timor, and Southern Africa.
Spanish is also spoken in the integral territories of Spain in North Africa, which include the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, the Plazas de soberanía, and the Canary Islands archipelago (population 2,000,000), located some off the northwest coast of mainland Africa. In northern Morocco, a former Spanish protectorate that is also geographically close to Spain, approximately 20,000 people speak Spanish as a second language, while Arabic is the "de jure" official language. A small number of Moroccan Jews also speak the Sephardic Spanish dialect Haketia (related to the Ladino dialect spoken in Israel). Spanish is spoken by some small communities in Angola because of the Cuban influence from the Cold War and in South Sudan among South Sudanese natives that relocated to Cuba during the Sudanese wars and returned in time for their country's independence.
The official language of the Republic is Arabic. The spoken languages are: Egyptian Arabic (68%), Sa'idi Arabic (29%), Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic (1.6%), Sudanese Arabic (0.6%), Domari (0.3%), Nobiin (0.3%), Beja (0.1%), Siwi and others. Additionally, Greek, Armenian and Italian, and more recently, African languages like Amharic and Tigrigna are the main languages of immigrants.
As a percentage of the general population of all Spain, Spanish is natively spoken by 74%, Catalan by 17%, Galician by 7% and Basque by 2% of all Spaniards. Occitan is spoken by less than 5,000 people, only in the small region of "Val d'Aran".
Other Romance minority languages, though not official, have special recognition, such as the Astur-Leonese language ("asturianu", "bable" or "llionés") and Aragonese ("aragonés") in Aragon.
There are four languages with official status in Catalonia (an autonomous community of Spain): Catalan; Spanish- which is official throughout Spain; Aranese, a dialect of Occitan spoken in the Aran Valley; and Catalan Sign Language. Many other languages are spoken in Catalonia as a result of recent immigration from all over the world.
Briasco was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Argentine parents. He also holds Armenian citizenship, however, through his mother, whose last name is Balekian. His grandfather lives in Argentina and has been helping him learn Armenian. Despite growing up speaking only Spanish, his mother would often speak Armenian to her parents (Norberto's grandparents), which is why he's once stated that "he knows some words, at least by ear". He's also claimed to be very proud of his Armenian heritage, which is why he "didn't hesitate when invited to the National Team". He still remains close to the Armenian community of south Buenos Aires city - sometimes attending community events.
As of 2009, the Italian language is officially used in twenty cities and municipalities and ten other settlements in Croatia, according to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. It is an officially recognized minority language in Istria County, where it is spoken by 6.83% of the population on the aggregate and closer to 50% of the population in certain subdivisions.
Other European languages spoken in Hispanic America include: English, by some groups in Puerto Rico; German, in southern Chile and portions of Argentina, Venezuela, and Paraguay; Italian, in Argentina, Venezuela, and Uruguay; Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian in Argentina; and Welsh, in southern Argentina.
Yiddish and Hebrew can be heard around Buenos Aires. Non-European or Asian languages include Japanese in Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay; Korean in Argentina and Paraguay; Arabic in Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Chile; and Chinese throughout South America.
Some languages are critically endangered, spoken only by a handful of isolated elderly people whose children do not speak the language; they are likely to become dead languages once the remaining speakers die. Vilela has about 20 speakers; Puelche has 5 or 6 speakers; in 2000 Tehuelche had 4 speakers, out of about 200 ethnic Tehuelche people, (2000 W. Adelaar); and in 1991 Selk'nam (also known as Ona) had 1 to 3 speakers and is nearly extinct; full blooded Ona people are already extinct.
Belgranodeutsch or Belgrano-Deutsch is a macaronic mixture of German and Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, specifically in the neighborhood of Belgrano.
Chinese is spoken by at least half of the over 60,000 Chinese immigrants, mostly in Buenos Aires.