Italian Argentine
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| Total population | |
| 25 million or 62.5% of Argentina’s population have at least one Italian immigrant ancestor | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Throughout Argentina (Plurality in the Pampas) |
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| Languages | |
| Rioplatense Spanish, Italian and Italian dialects. | |
| Religion | |
| Roman Catholicism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Italians, Italian Brazilians, Italian South African, Italian Chileans, Italian Mexican, Italian Americans, Italian Uruguayans, Italo-Venezuelans, Italian-Peruvian |
Italian Argentines (Italian: italo-argentini, Spanish: ítalo-argentinos) are Argentine-born citizens of Italian descent or Italian-born people who reside in Argentina. After Spain, Italy is the second largest ethnic origin of modern Argentines. It is estimated up to 25 million Argentines have some degree of Italian descent (up to 62.5% of the total population), Italians began arriving in Argentina in great numbers from 1857 to 1940, totaling 44.9% of the entire post-colonial immigrant population; more than from any other country (including Spain at 31.5%), and this migratory flow continued to the early 1950s, with Italy also having the most emigrants to Argentina for the decades 1980–2000.
In 1996, the population of Italian Argentines numbered 15.8 million when Argentina’s population was approximately 34.5 million, meaning they consisted of 45.5% of the population.
Italian settlement in Argentina, along with Spanish settlement, formed the backbone of today's Argentine society. Argentine culture has significant connections to Italian culture in terms of language, and customs.
Small groups of Italians started to immigrate to Argentina as early as the second half of the 18th century. However, the stream of Italian immigration to Argentina became a mass phenomenon only in the years 1880–1920 during the Great European immigration wave to Argentina, peaking between 1900–1914; about 2 million settled between 1880–1920, and just 1 million between 1900–1914. In 1914, the city of Buenos Aires alone had more than 300,000 Italian-born inhabitants, representing 25% of the total population. The Italian immigrants were primarily male, aged between 14 and 50 and more than 50% literate; in terms of occupations, 78.7% in the active population were agricultural workers or unskilled laborers, 10.7% artisans, while only 3.7% worked in commerce or as professionals. The outbreak of World War I and the rise of Fascism in Italy caused a rapid fall in immigration to Argentina, with a slight revival in 1923–1927, but eventually stopped during the Great Depression and the Second World War. After the end of World War II, Italy was reduced to rubble and occupied by foreign armies. The period 1946–1957 brought another massive wave of 380,000 Italians to Argentina. The substantial recovery allowed by the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s eventually caused the era of Italian diaspora abroad to finish, and in the following decades Italy became a migration receiving country. Today, there are still 527,570 Italian citizens living in the Argentine Republic.
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Wikipedia