The article focuses on the common languages between the different actors involved in judicial situation -judges, clerks, assistants, defendants, plaintiffs and witnesses- during the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, both in Argentina and Chile. Speech is analyzed, the "know-how", tactics and representations of men and women who participated in trials during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The study is based on a comparative exercise between these two countries, both in historiographical dimension and documentary content, regarding socially shared knowledge on justice of the past.