Spanish Phonology

This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the Spanish language. Unless otherwise noted, statements refer to Castilian Spanish, the standard dialect used in Spain on radio and television. For historical development of the sound system, see History of Spanish. For details of geographical variation, see Spanish dialects and varieties.

Phonemic representations are written inside slashes (), while phonetic representations are written in brackets ().

Consonants

The phonemes , , and are pronounced as voiced stops only after a pause, after a nasal consonant, or—in the case of —after a lateral consonant; in all other contexts, they are realized as approximants (namely , hereafter represented without the downtacks) or fricatives.

The phoneme is distinguished from only in some areas of Spain (mostly northern and rural) and South America (mostly highland). Other accents of Spanish, comprising the majority of speakers, have lost the palatal lateral as a distinct phoneme and have merged historical into : this is called ''yeísmo''.

The realization of the phoneme varies greatly by dialect. In Castilian Spanish, its allophones in word-initial position include the palatal approximant , the palatal fricative , the palatal affricate and the palatal stop . After a pause, a nasal, or a lateral, it may be realized as an affricate (); in other contexts, /ʝ/ is generally realized as an approximant . In Rioplatense Spanish, spoken across Argentina and Uruguay, the voiced palato-alveolar fricative is used in place of and , a feature called "zheísmo". In the last few decades, it has further become popular, particularly among younger speakers in Argentina and Uruguay, to de-voice to ("sheísmo").

The phone occurs as a deaffricated pronunciation of in some other dialects (most notably, Northern Mexican Spanish, informal Chilean Spanish, and some Caribbean and Andalusian accents). Otherwise, is a marginal phoneme that occurs only in loanwords or certain dialects; many speakers have difficulty with this sound, tending to replace it with or .

Many young Argentinians have no distinct phoneme and use the sequence instead, thus making no distinction between and (both ).

Most varieties spoken in Spain, including those prevalent on radio and television, have a phonemic contrast between and . Speakers with this contrast (which is called ''distinción'') use in words spelled with , such as 'house' , and in words spelled with or (when it occurs before or ), such as 'hunt' . However, speakers in parts of southern Spain, the Canary Islands, and all of Latin America lack this distinction, merging both consonants as . The use of in place of is called ''seseo''. Some speakers in southernmost Spain (especially coastal Andalusia) merge both consonants as : this is called ''ceceo'', since sounds similar to . This "ceceo" is not entirely unknown in the Americas, especially in coastal Peru.

The exact pronunciation of varies widely by dialect: it may be pronounced as or omitted entirely ( ��, especially at the end of a syllable.

The phonemes and are laminal denti-alveolar (). The phoneme becomes dental before denti-alveolar consonants, while remains interdental in all contexts.

Before front vowels , the velar consonants (including the lenited allophone of ) are realized as post-palatal .

According to some authors, is post-velar or uvular in the Spanish of northern and central Spain. Others describe as velar in European Spanish, with a uvular allophone () appearing before and (including when is in the syllable onset as ).

A common pronunciation of in nonstandard speech is the voiceless bilabial fricative , so that is pronounced rather than . In some Extremaduran, western Andalusian, and American varieties, this softened realization of , when it occurs before the non-syllabic allophone of (), is subject to merger with ; in some areas the homophony of / is resolved by replacing with or .

Consonant neutralizations and assimilations

Some of the phonemic contrasts between consonants in Spanish are lost in certain phonological environments, especially at the end of a syllable. In these cases, the phonemic contrast is said to be neutralized.

Sonorants

=Nasals and laterals

=

At the start of a syllable, there is a contrast between three nasal consonants: , , and (as in ''cama'' 'bed', ''cana'' 'grey hair', ''caña'' 'sugar cane'), but at the end of a syllable, this contrast is generally neutralized, as nasals assimilate to the place of articulation of the following consonant—even across a word boundary.

Within a morpheme, a syllable-final nasal is obligatorily pronounced with the same place of articulation as a following stop consonant, as in ''banco'' . An exception to coda nasal place assimilation is the sequence that can be found in the middle of words such as , , .

Only one nasal consonant, , can occur at the end of words in native vocabulary. When followed by a pause, is pronounced by most speakers as alveolar (though in Caribbean varieties, it may be pronounced instead as , or omitted with nasalization of the preceding vowel). When followed by another consonant, morpheme-final shows variable place assimilation depending on speech rate and style.

Word-final and in stand-alone loanwords or proper nouns may be adapted to , e.g. ''álbum'' ('album').

Similarly, assimilates to the place of articulation of a following coronal consonant, i.e. a consonant that is interdental, dental, alveolar, or palatal. In dialects that maintain the use of , there is no contrast between and in coda position, and syllable-final appears only as an allophone of in rapid speech.

=Rhotics

=
The alveolar trill and the alveolar tap are in phonemic contrast word-internally between vowels (as in ''carro'' 'car' vs. ''caro'' 'expensive'), but are otherwise in complementary distribution, as long as syllable division is taken into account: the tap occurs after any syllable-initial consonant, while the trill occurs after any syllable-final consonant.

Only the trill can occur at the start of a word (e.g. ''el rey'' 'the king', ''la reina'' 'the queen') or after a syllable-final (coda) consonant (e.g. ''alrededor'', ''enriquecer'', ''desratizar'').

Only the tap can occur after a word-initial obstruent consonant (e.g. ''tres'' 'three', ''frío'' 'cold').

Either a trill or a tap can occur word-medially after , , depending on whether the rhotic consonant is pronounced in the same syllable as the preceding obstruent (forming a complex onset cluster) or in a separate syllable (with the obstruent forming the coda of the preceding syllable). The tap is found in words where no morpheme boundary separates the obstruent from the following rhotic consonant, such as ''sobre'' 'over', ''madre'' 'mother', ''ministro'' 'minister'. The trill is only found in words where the rhotic consonant is preceded by a morpheme boundary and thus a syllable boundary, such as ''subrayar, ciudadrealeño, postromántico''; compare the corresponding word-initial trills in ''raya'' 'line', ''Ciudad Real'' "Ciudad Real", and ''romántico'' "Romantic".

In syllable-final position inside a word, the tap is more frequent, but the trill can also occur (especially in emphatic or oratorical style) with no semantic difference—thus ''arma'' ('weapon') may be either (tap) or (trill).
In ''word''-final position the rhotic is usually:
* either a tap or a trill when followed by a consonant or a pause, as in ''amo'' ''paterno'' ('paternal love'), the former being more common;
* a tap when followed by a vowel-initial word, as in ''amo'' ''eterno'' ('eternal love').

Morphologically, a word-final rhotic always corresponds to the tapped in related words. Thus the word 'smell' is related to 'smells, smelly' and not to .

When two rhotics occur consecutively across a word or prefix boundary, they result in one trill, so that ''da rocas'' ('they(sg) give rocks') and ''dar rocas'' ('to give rocks') are either neutralized or distinguished by a longer trill in the latter phrase.

The tap/trill alternation has prompted a number of authors to postulate a single underlying rhotic; the intervocalic contrast then results from gemination (e.g. ''tierra'' > 'earth').

Obstruents

The phonemes , , and may be voiced before voiced consonants, as in ('jasmine') , ('feature') , and ('Afghanistan') . There is a certain amount of free variation in this, so can be pronounced or . Such voicing may occur across word boundaries, causing ('merry Christmas') /feˈliθ nabiˈdad/ to be pronounced eˈlið naβ̞iˈð̞að̞ In one region of Spain, the area around Madrid, word-final is sometimes pronounced , especially in a colloquial pronunciation of the city's name, which results being pronounced as . More so, in some words now spelled with ''-z-'' before a voiced consonant, the phoneme is in fact diachronically derived from original or . For example, comes from Old Spanish , and comes from Old Spanish , from Latin .

Both in casual and formal speech, there is no phonemic contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants placed in syllable-final position. The merged phoneme is typically pronounced as a relaxed, voiced fricative or approximant, although a variety of other realizations are also possible. So the clusters -- and -- in the words and are pronounced exactly the same way:
*
*
Similarly, the spellings and are often merged in pronunciation, as well as -- and --:
*
*
*
*

Semivowels

Traditionally, the palatal consonant phoneme is considered to occur only as a syllable onset, whereas the palatal glide that can be found after an onset consonant in words like ''bien'' is analyzed as a non-syllabic version of the vowel phoneme (which forms part of the syllable nucleus, being pronounced with the following vowel as a rising diphthong). The approximant allophone of , which can be transcribed as , differs phonetically from in the following respects: has a lower F2 amplitude, is longer, can be replaced by a palatal fricative in emphatic pronunciations, and is unspecified for rounding (e.g. ''viuda'' 'widow' vs. ''ayuda'' 'help').

After a consonant, the surface contrast between and depends on syllabification, which in turn is largely predictable from morphology: the syllable boundary before corresponds to the morphological boundary after a prefix. A contrast is therefore possible after any consonant that can end a syllable, as illustrated by the following minimal or near-minimal pairs: after (''italiano'' 'Italian' vs. ''y tal llano'' 'and such a plain'), after (''enyesar'' 'to plaster' vs. ''aniego'' 'flood') after (''desierto'' 'desert' vs. ''deshielo'' 'thawing'), after (''abierto'' 'open' vs. ''abyecto'' 'abject').

Although there is dialectal and idiolectal variation, speakers may also exhibit a contrast in phrase-initial position. In Argentine Spanish, the change of to a fricative realized as has resulted in clear contrast between this consonant and the glide ; the latter occurs as a result of spelling pronunciation in words spelled with , such as 'grass' (which thus forms a minimal pair in Argentine Spanish with the doublet 'maté leaves').

There are some alternations between the two, prompting scholars like to postulate an archiphoneme , so that ''ley'' would be transcribed phonemically as and ''leyes'' as .

In a number of varieties, including some American ones, there is a similar distinction between the non-syllabic version of the vowel and a rare consonantal . Near-minimal pairs include ''deshuesar'' ('to debone') vs. ''desuello'' ('skinning'), ''son huevos'' ('they are eggs') vs. ''son nuevos'' ('they are new'), and ''huaca'' ('Indian grave') vs. ''u oca'' ('or goose').

Vowels

Spanish has five vowel phonemes, , , , and (the same as Asturian-Leonese, Aragonese, and also Basque). Each of the five vowels occurs in both stressed and unstressed syllables:

Nevertheless, there are some distributional gaps or rarities. For instance, the close vowels are rare in unstressed word-final syllables.

There is no surface phonemic distinction between close-mid and open-mid vowels, unlike in Catalan, Galician, French, Italian and Portuguese. In the historical development of Spanish, former open-mid vowels were replaced with diphthongs in stressed syllables, and merged with the close-mid in unstressed syllables. The diphthongs regularly correspond to open in Portuguese cognates; compare ''siete'' 'seven' and ''fuerte'' 'strong' with the Portuguese cognates ''sete'' and ''forte'' , meaning the same.

There are some synchronic alternations between the diphthongs in stressed syllables and the monophthongs in unstressed syllables: compare ''heló'' 'it froze' and ''tostó'' 'he toasted' with ''hiela'' 'it freezes' and ''tuesto'' 'I toast'. It has thus been argued that the historically open-mid vowels remain underlyingly, giving Spanish seven vowel phonemes.

Because of substratal Quechua, at least some speakers from southern Colombia down through Peru can be analyzed to have only three vowel phonemes , as the close are continually confused with the mid , resulting in pronunciations such as for ''dulzura'' ('sweetness'). When Quechua-dominant bilinguals have in their phonemic inventory, they realize them as , which are heard by outsiders as variants of . Both of those features are viewed as strongly non-standard by other speakers.

Allophones

Vowels are phonetically nasalized between nasal consonants or before a syllable-final nasal, e.g. ('five') and ('hand').

Arguably, Eastern Andalusian and Murcian Spanish have ten phonemic vowels, with each of the above vowels paired by a lowered or fronted and lengthened version, e.g. ('the mother') vs. ('the mothers'). However, these are more commonly analyzed as allophones triggered by an underlying that is subsequently deleted.

Exact number of allophones

There is no agreement among scholars on how many vowel allophones Spanish has; an often postulated number is five .

Some scholars, however, state that Spanish has ''eleven'' allophones: the close and mid vowels have close and open allophones, whereas appears in front , central and back variants. These symbols appear only in the narrowest variant of phonetic transcription; in broader variants, only the symbols are used, and that is the convention adopted in the rest of this article.

Tomás Navarro Tomás describes the distribution of said eleven allophones as follows:

* Close vowels
** The close allophones appear in open syllables, e.g. in the words 'free' and 'to raise'
** The open allophones are phonetically near-close , and appear:
*** In closed syllables, e.g. in the word 'end'
*** In both open and closed syllables when in contact with , e.g. in the words 'rich' and 'blond'
*** In both open and closed syllables when before , e.g. in the words 'son' and 'they(sg) bid'
* Mid front vowel
** The close allophone is phonetically close-mid , and appears:
*** In open syllables, e.g. in the word 'finger'
*** In closed syllables when before , e.g. in the word 'Valencia'
** The open allophone is phonetically open-mid , and appears:
*** In open syllables when in contact with , e.g. in the words 'war' and 'challenge'
*** In closed syllables when not followed by , e.g. in the word 'Belgian'
*** In the diphthong , e.g. in the words 'comb' and ''king''
* Mid back vowel
** The close allophone is phonetically close-mid , and appears in open syllables, e.g. in the word 'how'
** The open allophone is phonetically open-mid , and appears:
*** In closed syllables, e.g. in the word 'with'
*** In both open and closed syllables when in contact with , e.g. in the words 'I run', 'mud', and 'oak'
*** In both open and closed syllables when before , e.g. in the word 'eye'
*** In the diphthong , e.g. in the word 'today'
*** In stressed position when preceded by and followed by either or , e.g. in the word 'now'
* Open vowel
** The front allophone appears:
*** Before palatal consonants, e.g. in the word 'office'
*** In the diphthong , e.g. in the word 'air'
** The back allophone appears:
*** In the diphthong , e.g. in the word 'flute'
*** Before
*** In closed syllables before , e.g. in the word 'salt'
*** In both open and closed syllables when before , e.g. in the word 'chop'
** The central allophone appears in all other cases, e.g. in the word

According to Eugenio Martínez Celdrán, however, systematic classification of Spanish allophones is impossible since their occurrence varies from speaker to speaker and from region to region. According to him, the exact degree of openness of Spanish vowels depends not so much on the phonetic environment but rather on various external factors accompanying speech.

Diphthongs and triphthongs

Spanish has six falling diphthongs and eight rising diphthongs. While many diphthongs are historically the result of a recategorization of vowel sequences (hiatus) as diphthongs, there is still lexical contrast between diphthongs and hiatus. Some lexical items vary by speaker or dialect between hiatus and diphthong. Words like ('biologist') with a potential diphthong in the first syllable and words like with a stressed or pretonic sequence of and a vowel vary between a diphthong and hiatus. hypothesize that this is caused by vocalic sequences being longer in those positions.

In addition to synalepha across word boundaries, sequences of vowels in hiatus become diphthongs in fast speech. When this happens, one vowel becomes non-syllabic (unless they are the same vowel in which case they fuse together) as in ('poet') and ('teacher'). Similarly, the relatively rare diphthong may be reduced to in certain unstressed contexts, as in , . In the case of verbs like ('relieve'), diphthongs result from the suffixation of normal verbal morphology onto a stem-final (that is, would be , , + , , ). This contrasts with verbs like ('to extend') which, by their verbal morphology, seem to have stems ending in .

Non-syllabic and can be reduced to , , as in ('beatitude') and ('poetess'), respectively; similarly, non-syllabic can be completely elided, as in ( 'right away'). The frequency (though not the presence) of this phenomenon varies by dialect: in a number it rarely occurs, while others always exhibit it.

Spanish also possesses triphthongs like and, in dialects that use a second-person plural conjugation, , , and (e.g. , 'ox'; , 'you change'; , '(that) you may change'; and , 'you ascertain').

Prosody

Spanish is usually considered a syllable-timed language. Even so, stressed syllables may be up to 50% longer in duration than non-stressed syllables. Although pitch, duration, and loudness contribute to the perception of stress, pitch is the most important in isolation.

Primary stress falls on the penultima (second-last syllable) 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, stress falls on the ultima (last syllable) or on the antepenultima (third-last syllable).

Nonverbs are generally stressed on the penultimate syllable for vowel-final words and on the final syllable of consonant-final words. Exceptions are marked orthographically (see below), and regular words are underlyingly phonologically marked with a stress feature stress

In addition to exceptions to these tendencies, particularly learned words from Greek and Latin that feature antepenultimate stress, there are numerous minimal pairs that contrast solely on stress such as ('sheet') and ('savannah'), as well as ('boundary'), ('hatthey(sg.) limit') and ('I limited').

Lexical stress may be marked orthographically with an acute accent (, , etc.). This is done according to the mandatory stress rules of Spanish orthography, which parallel the tendencies above (differing with words like ) and are defined so as to unequivocally indicate where the stress lies in a given written word. An acute accent may also be used to differentiate homophones, such as ('my') and ('me'). In such cases, the accent is used on the homophone that normally receives greater stress when it is used in a sentence.

Lexical stress patterns are different between words carrying verbal and nominal inflection: in addition to the occurrence of verbal affixes with stress (something absent in nominal inflection), underlying stress also differs in that it falls on the last syllable of the inflectional stem in verbal words while those of nominal words may have ultimate or penultimate stress. In addition, in sequences of clitics suffixed to a verb, the rightmost clitic may receive secondary stress: ('look for it').

Phonotactics

Syllable structure

Spanish syllable structure consists of an optional syllable onset, consisting of one or two consonants; an obligatory syllable nucleus, consisting of a vowel optionally preceded by and/or followed by a semivowel; and an optional syllable coda, consisting of one or two consonants. This can be summarized as follows (parentheses enclose optional components):
* (C₁ (C₂)) (S₁) V (S₂) (C₃ (C₄))

The following restrictions apply:
* Onset
** First consonant (C₁): Can be any consonant. Either or is possible as a word-internal onset after a vowel, but as discussed above, the contrast between the two rhotic consonants is neutralized at the start of a word or when the preceding syllable ends in a consonant: only is possible in those positions.
** Second consonant (C₂): Can be or . Permitted only if the first consonant is a stop , a voiceless labiodental fricative , or marginally the nonstandard /v/. is prohibited as an onset cluster in most of Peninsular Spanish, while sequences such as in 'athlete' are usually treated as an onset cluster in Latin America and the Canaries. The sequence is also avoided as an onset, seemingly to a greater degree than .
* Nucleus
** Semivowel (S₁): Can be or , normally analyzed phonemically as allophones of non-syllabic . Cannot be identical to the following vowel (* and * do not occur within a syllable).
** Vowel (V): Can be any of .
** Semivowel (S₂): Can be or , normally analyzed phonemically as allophones of non-syllabic . The sequences *, * and * do not occur within a syllable. Some linguists consider postvocalic glides to be part of the coda rather than the nucleus.
* Coda
** First consonant (C₃): Can be any consonant except , or .
** Second consonant (C₄): Always in native Spanish words. Other consonants, except , and , are tolerated as long as they are less sonorous than the first consonant in the coda, such as in or the Catalan last name , but the final element is sometimes deleted in colloquial speech. A coda of two consonants never appears in words inherited from Vulgar Latin.
** In many dialects, a coda cannot be more than one consonant (one of n, r, l or s) in informal speech. Realizations like , , are very common, and in many cases, they are allowed even in formal speech.

Maximal onsets include , , .

Maximal nuclei include , .

Maximal codas include , .

Spanish syllable structure is phrasal, resulting in syllables consisting of phonemes from neighboring words in combination, sometimes even resulting in elision. The phenomenon is known in Spanish as . For a brief discussion contrasting Spanish and English syllable structure, see .

Other phonotactic tendencies

* The palatal sonorants are rare in certain positions, although this may be a consequence of their diachronic origins (being derived often, though not exclusively, from Latin geminate consonants) rather than a matter of synchronic constraints.
**Per Baker 2004, the palatal sonorants are not found as word-internal onsets when the preceding syllable ends in a coda consonant or glide. A number of exceptions to this generalization exist, however, including prefixed or compound words (such as , , ), borrowed words (such as , , , from Quechua), and forms that originate from non-Castilian Romance varieties (such as Asturian ). The sequence occurs in some proper names, such as the toponym Auñón (from Latin ) and Auñamendi (a publishing house name taken from the Basque name of the Pic d'Anie); occurs in some words, such as and .
**Although word-initial is not forbidden (for example, it occurs in borrowed words such as and and in dialectal forms such as ) it is relatively rare and so may be described as having restricted distribution in this position.
* In native Spanish words, the trill does not appear after a glide. That said, it does appear after in some Basque loans, such as Aurrerá, a grocery store, Abaurrea Alta and Abaurrea Baja, towns in Navarre, , a type of dance, and , an adjective referring to poorly tilled land.
*When the final syllable of a word begins with any of , the word typically does not display antepenultimate stress.

Epenthesis

Because of the phonotactic constraints, an epenthetic is inserted before word-initial clusters beginning with (e.g. 'to write') but not word-internally ( 'to transcribe'), thereby moving the initial to a separate syllable. Except in careful pronunciation, the epenthetic is pronounced even when it is not reflected in spelling (e.g. the surname of Carlos Slim is pronounced ). While Spanish words undergo word-initial epenthesis, cognates in Latin and Italian do not:

* Lat. ''status'' ('state') ~ It. ''stato'' ~ Sp.
* Lat. ''splendidus'' ('splendid') ~ It. ''splendido'' ~ Sp.
* Fr. ''slave'' ('Slav') ~ It. ''slavo'' ~ Sp.

In addition, Spanish adopts foreign words starting with pre-nasalized consonants with an epenthetic . , a prominent last name from Equatorial Guinea, is pronounced as .

When adapting word-final complex codas that show rising sonority, an epenthetic is inserted between the two consonants. For example, is typically pronounced .

Occasionally Spanish speakers are faced with onset clusters containing elements of equal or near-equal sonority, such as (a German last name that is common in parts of South America). Assimilated borrowings usually delete the first element in such clusters, as in 'psychology'. When attempting to pronounce such words for the first time without deleting the first consonant, Spanish speakers insert a short, often devoiced, schwa-like vowel between the two consonants.

Alternations

Some alternations exist in Spanish that reflect diachronic changes in the language and arguably reflect morphophonological processes rather than strictly phonological ones. For instance, some words alternate between and or and , with the latter in each pair appearing before a front vowel:

Note that the conjugation of most verbs with a stem ending in or does ''not'' show this alternation; these segments do not turn into or before a front vowel:

There are also alternations between unstressed and and stressed (or , when initial) and respectively:

Likewise, in a very small number of words, alternations occur between the palatal sonorants and their corresponding alveolar sonorants (/ 'maiden'/'youth', / 'to scorn'/'scorn'). This alternation does not appear in verbal or nominal inflection (that is, the plural of is , not ). This is the result of geminated and of Vulgar Latin (the origin of and , respectively) degeminating and then depalatalizing in coda position. Words without any palatal-alveolar allomorphy are the result of historical borrowings.

Other alternations include ~ ( vs. ), ~ ( vs. ). Here the forms with and are historical borrowings and the forms with and forms are inherited from Vulgar Latin.

There are also pairs that show antepenultimate stress in nouns and adjectives but penultimate stress in synonymous verbs ( 'vomit' vs. 'I vomit').

Acquisition as first language

Phonology

Phonological development varies greatly by individual for both those developing regularly and those with delays. However, a general pattern of acquisition of phonemes can be inferred by the level of complexity of their features, i.e. by sound classes. A hierarchy may be constructed, and if a child is capable of producing discrimination on one level, they will also be capable of making the discriminations of all prior levels.

* The first level consists of stops (without a voicing distinction), nasals, , and optionally a non-lateral approximant. This includes a labial/ coronal place difference ( vs. and vs. ).
* The second level includes voicing distinction for oral stops and a coronal/dorsal place difference. This allows for a distinction between , , and , along with their voiced counterparts, as well as a distinction between and the approximant .
* The third level includes fricatives and/or affricates.
* The fourth level introduces liquids other than , and . It also introduces .
* The fifth level introduces the trill .

This hierarchy is based on production only and is a representation of a child's capacity to produce a sound, whether that sound is the correct target in adult speech or not. Thus, it may contain some sounds that are not included in adult phonology but are produced as a result of error.

Spanish-speaking children will accurately produce most segments at a relatively early age. By around three-and-a-half years, they will no longer productively use phonological processes the majority of the time. Some common error patterns (found 10% or more of the time) are cluster reduction, liquid simplification, and stopping. Less common patterns (evidenced less than 10% of the time) include palatal fronting, assimilation, and final consonant deletion.

Typical phonological analyses of Spanish consider the consonants , , and the underlying phonemes and their corresponding approximants , , and allophonic and derivable by phonological rules. However, approximants may be the more basic form because monolingual Spanish-learning children learn to produce the continuant contrast between and before they produce the lead voicing contrast between and . (In comparison, English-learning children are able to produce adult-like voicing contrasts for these stops well before age three.) The allophonic distribution of and produced in adult speech is not learned until after age two and not fully mastered even at age four.

The alveolar trill is one of the most difficult sounds to produce in Spanish and is acquired later in development. Research suggests that the alveolar trill is acquired and developed between the ages of three and six years. Some children acquire an adult-like trill within this period, and some fail to properly acquire the trill. The attempted trill sound of the poor trillers is often perceived as a series of taps owing to hyperactive tongue movement during production. The trill is also often very difficult for those learning Spanish as a second language, sometimes taking over a year to be produced properly.

Codas

One study found that children acquire medial codas before final codas, and stressed codas before unstressed codas. Since medial codas are often stressed and must undergo place assimilation, greater importance is accorded to their acquisition. Liquid and nasal codas occur word-medially and at the ends of frequently-used function words and so they are often acquired first.

Prosody

Research suggests that children overgeneralize stress rules when they are reproducing novel Spanish words and that they have a tendency to stress the penultimate syllables of antepenultimately stressed words to avoid a violation of nonverb stress rules that they have acquired. Many of the most frequent words heard by children have irregular stress patterns or are verbs, which violate nonverb stress rules. This complicates stress rules until ages three to four, when stress acquisition is essentially complete, and children begin to apply these rules to novel irregular situations.

Dialectal variation

Some features, such as the pronunciation of voiceless stops , have no dialectal variation. However, there are numerous other features of pronunciation that differ from dialect to dialect.

''Yeísmo''

One notable dialectal feature is the merging of the voiced palatal approximant (as in ''ayer'') with the palatal lateral approximant (as in ) into one phoneme (''yeísmo''), with losing its laterality. While the distinction between these two sounds has traditionally been a feature of Castilian Spanish, this merger has spread throughout most of Spain in recent generations, particularly outside of regions in close linguistic contact with Catalan and Basque. In Spanish America, most dialects are characterized by this merger, with the distinction persisting mostly in parts of Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and northwestern Argentina. In the other parts of Argentina, the phoneme resulting from the merger is realized as , and in Buenos Aires. the sound has recently been devoiced to for the younger population, a change that is spreading throughout Argentina.

''Seseo'', ''ceceo'' and ''distinción''

Speakers in northern and central Spain, including the variety prevalent on radio and television, have both and (''distinción'', 'distinction'). However, speakers in Latin America, the Canary Islands and some parts of southern Spain have only (''seseo''), which in southernmost Spain is pronounced , not (''ceceo'').

Realization of

The phoneme has three different pronunciations depending on the dialect area:
# An alveolar retracted fricative (or "apico-alveolar" fricative) , which sounds similar to English and is characteristic of the northern and central parts of Spain and is also used by many speakers in Colombia's Antioquia Department.
# A alveolar grooved fricative , much like the most common pronunciation of English , is characteristic of western Andalusia (e.g. Málaga, Seville, and Cádiz), the Canary Islands, and Latin America.
# An dental grooved fricative (ad hoc symbol), which has a lisping quality and sounds something like a cross between English and but is different from the occurring in dialects that distinguish and . It occurs only in dialects with ceceo, mostly in Granada, in parts of Jaén, in the southern part of Sevilla and the mountainous areas shared between Cádiz and Málaga.

Obaid describes the apico-alveolar sound as follows:

Dalbor describes the apico-dental sound as follows:

In some dialects, may become the approximant in the syllable coda (e.g. ''doscientos'' 'two hundred'). In southern dialects in Spain, most lowland dialects in the Americas, and in the Canary Islands, it debuccalizes to in final position (e.g. ''niños'' 'children'), or before another consonant (e.g. 'match') and so the change occurs in the coda position in a syllable. In Spain, this was originally a southern feature, but is now expanding rapidly to the north.

From an autosegmental point of view, the phoneme in Madrid is defined only by its ''voiceless'' and ''fricative'' features. Thus, the point of articulation is not defined and is determined from the sounds after it in a word or sentence. In Madrid, the following realizations are found: > and > . In parts of southern Spain, the only feature defined for appears to be ''voiceless''; it may lose its oral articulation entirely to become or even a geminate with the following consonant ( or from 'same'). In Eastern Andalusian and Murcian Spanish, word-final , and regularly weaken, and the preceding vowel is lowered and lengthened:
: > e.g. ''mis'' ('my' pl)
: > e.g. ''mes'' ('month')
: > e.g. ''más'' ('plus')
: > e.g. ''tos'' ('cough')
: > e.g. ''tus'' ('your' pl)

A subsequent process of vowel harmony takes place and so ('far') is , ('you luralhave') is and ('clovers') is or .

Coda simplification

Southern European Spanish (Andalusian Spanish, Murcian Spanish, etc.) and several lowland dialects in Latin America (such as those from the Caribbean, Panama, and the Atlantic coast of Colombia) exhibit more extreme forms of simplification of coda consonants:
* word-final dropping of (e.g. ''compás'' 'musical beat' or 'compass')
* word-final dropping of nasals with nasalization of the preceding vowel (e.g. ''ven'' 'come')
* dropping of in the infinitival morpheme (e.g. ''comer'' 'to eat')
* the occasional dropping of coda consonants word-internally (e.g. ''doctor'' 'doctor').

The dropped consonants appear when additional suffixation occurs (e.g. ''compases'' 'beats', ''venían'' 'they were coming', ''comeremos'' 'we will eat'). Similarly, a number of coda assimilations occur:
* and may neutralize to (e.g. Cibaeño Dominican ''celda''/''cerda'' 'cell'/'bristle'), to (e.g. Caribbean Spanish ''alma''/''arma'' 'soul'/'weapon', Andalusian Spanish ''sartén'' 'pan'), to (e.g. Andalusian Spanish ''alma''/''arma'' ) or, by complete regressive assimilation, to a copy of the following consonant (e.g. ''pulga''/''purga'' 'flea'/'purge', ''carne'' 'meat').
* , , (and in southern Peninsular Spanish) and may be debuccalized or elided in the coda (e.g. ''los amigos'' 'the friends').
* Stops and nasals may be realized as velar (e.g. Cuban and Venezuelan ''étnico'' 'ethnic', ''himno'' 'anthem').

Final dropping (e.g. ''mitad'' 'half') is general in most dialects of Spanish, even in formal speech.

The neutralization of syllable-final , , and is widespread in most dialects (with e.g. ''Pepsi'' being pronounced ). It does not face as much stigma as other neutralizations and may go unnoticed.

The deletions and neutralizations show variability in their occurrence, even with the same speaker in the same utterance, so non-deleted forms exist in the underlying structure. The dialects may not be on the path to eliminating coda consonants since deletion processes have been existing for more than four centuries. argues that it is the result of speakers acquiring multiple phonological systems with uneven control like that of second language learners.

In Standard European Spanish, the voiced obstruents before a pause are devoiced and laxed to , as in ''club'' (' ocialclub'), ''sed'' ('thirst'), ''zigzag'' . However, word-final is rare, and is even more so. They are restricted mostly to loanwords and foreign names, such as the first name of the former Real Madrid sports director Predrag Mijatović, which is pronounced , and after another consonant, the voiced obstruent may even be deleted, as in ''iceberg'', pronounced . In Madrid and its environs, ''sed'' is alternatively pronounced , and the aforementioned alternative pronunciation of word-final as co-exists with the standard realization, but is otherwise nonstandard.

Loan sounds

The fricative may also appear in borrowings from other languages, such as Nahuatl and English. In addition, the affricates and also occur in Nahuatl borrowings. That said, the onset cluster is permitted in most of Latin America, the Canaries, and the northwest of Spain, and the fact that it is pronounced in the same amount of time as the other voiceless stop + lateral clusters and support an analysis of the sequence as a cluster, rather than an affricate, in Mexican Spanish.

Sample

This sample is an adaptation of Aesop's "El Viento del Norte y el Sol" ( The North Wind and the Sun) read by a man from Northern Mexico born in the late 1980s. As usual in Mexican Spanish, and are not present.

Orthographic version

Phonemic transcription

Phonetic transcription

See also

* History of the Spanish language
* List of phonetics topics
* Spanish dialects and varieties
* Stress in Spanish
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Notes

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External links

Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: Castilian Spanish
– audio samples

{{DEFAULTSORT:Spanish Phonology

Phonology