of very strong cultural syncretism". At the same time there are Italian traditions still maintained in Argentina but forgotten or little remembered in Italy. Many of these Italians who brought their culture came from the lower middle classes. Language According to Ethnologue, Argentina has more than 1,500,000 Italian speakers, making it the third most spoken language in the nation (after Spanish and English). In spite of the great many Italian immigrants, the Italian language never truly took hold in Argentina, partly because at the time of mass immigration, almost all Italians spoke their native regional languages rather than what is now standard Italian, precluding the expansion of the use of Italian as a primary language in Argentina. The similarity between Spanish and many of those languages also enabled the immigrants to acquire communicative competence in Spanish with relative ease, and thus to assimilate linguistically without much difficulty. By 1840 Italian-language newspapers were already published in Buenos Aires, increasing in 1900. The main one was La Patria degli Italiani ("The homeland of the Italians"), which in turn was the third most important in Argentina, with a circulation of 14,000 copies. On 22 February 1917 the government of Hipólito Yrigoyen, with Decree n. 6925, made the teaching of the Italian language compulsory in the 4th and 5th grades of secondary school in national schools. Italian immigration from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century made a lasting and significant impact on the intonation of Argentina's vernacular Spanish. Preliminary research has shown that Rioplatense Spanish, particularly the speech of the city of Buenos Aires, has intonation patterns that resemble those of Italian dialects (especially the ones whose substratum is the Neapolitan language) and differ markedly from the patterns of other forms of Spanish. That correlates well with immigration patterns as Argentina, particularly Buenos Aires, which had huge numbers of Italian settlers since the 19th century. According to a study conducted by National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, and published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (ISSN 1366–7289) The researchers note that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, starting in the early 20th century with the main wave of Southern Italian immigration. Until then, the porteño accent was more similar to that of Spain, particularly Andalusia. Lunfardo is a slang born and developed in the city of Buenos Airesand its suburbs, which has spread to other