Argentine slang of relatively recent invention, purportedly meaning commercial operations that are kept unregistered to elude sales taxes. There's been a recent push to impose this word, via twitter and other social media flame wars. According to the pushing party it comes from a small community of originally Syrian Jewish merchants of Buenos Aires. A dubious Arabic or Turkish origin is claimed for this term, which is nonetheless not in use, with such meaning, either in colloquial or grammatical Arabic or Turkish. There's an Arabic term matching the word and meaning "external, extraneous, exterior, foreign."
Used in US as well
"¿La venta es en blanco o en barrani?"
Barrani is the name of an Egyptian town also known as Sidi Barrani. The term is attributed to the Sephardic Turks who use it as a synonym for "black" and it is used to mention what is "illegal", "clandestine", "absent from all state regulation". Some synonyms, words or similar expressions can be illegal, clandestine, black
Used in US as well
"I paid "barrani" and left 20% tips."
100% Barrani. Argentina will come back stronger.
Synonyms of barrani are nigger
Used in Argentina as well
"we use barrani when we want to have sex ahahah"
In this entry there are some confusions with the lunfardo use of 'barrani', surely to misinterpret flames in tweets, or local articles written for those who understand the context. In principle 'barrani' or 'barani' is taken from Turkish, it is used as "black", but for race, because in Arabic it is "foreign, immigrant" and Arabs in Africa considered foreign (as Albarraní) to the natives who entered their possessions, or who even embraced Islamism. In America (perhaps already in Spain) it simply became the color. As the informal economic transaction (without receipts or seat, to evade taxes) is called "in black", some members of the Turkish community in Argentina also began to say 'barrani'.