Yeísmo

''Yeísmo'' (; literally "Y-ism") is a distinctive feature of certain dialects of the Spanish language, characterized by the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme (written ) and its merger into the phoneme (written ), usually realized as a palatal approximant or affricate. It is an example of delateralization.

In other words, and represent the same sound when is present. The term comes from one of the Spanish names for the letter (). Over 90% of Spanish speakers exhibit this phonemic merger. Similar mergers exist in other languages, such as French, Italian, Hungarian, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese or Galician, with different social considerations.

Occasionally, the term () has been used to refer to the maintenance of the phonemic distinction between and .

Pronunciation

Most dialects that merge the two sounds represented by and realize the remaining sound as a voiced palatal approximant , which is much like in English ''your''. However, it sometimes becomes a voiced palatal affricate , sounding somewhat like in English ''jar'', especially when appearing after or or at the beginning of a word. For example, is pronounced and is pronounced or .

In dialects where is maintained, its pronunciation involves constriction in both the alveolar or post-alveolar area and in the palatal area. Its duration when between vowels is 20% longer than that of a simple , and the formant transitions to the following vowel are nearly twice as long. Replacing with can thus be considered a type of lenition since it results in a lower degree of closure.

and

In most of Argentina and Uruguay the merged sound is pronounced as a sibilant ; this is referred to as .

The sound itself may have originated in Argentina and Uruguay as an influence of local Amerindian languages on the colonial pronunciation of the Spanish language typical of the area's inhabitants of that time, a pronunciation that persisted after the mass immigration of post-colonial Italians and Spaniards into the region which otherwise transformed the demographics and affected aspects of the Spanish language there, including most noticeably intonation. Prior to this post-colonial mass immigration wave, as most other South American countries, their populations were similarly composed of a mestizo majority (those of mixed Spaniard and Amerindian ancestry). In Buenos Aires the sound has recently been devoiced to () among younger speakers.

In the Andean Sierra region of Ecuador, by contrast, where the Amerindian-origin pronunciation of /ʎ/ as survives among the majority population of colonial-descended mestizos, the sibilant has not merged as in Argentina and Uruguay, and so a distinction is also maintained but with representing (rather than the original Spanish sound) and representing . In the orthography of several Ecuadorian dialects of Quichua, under the influence of the orthography of Ecuadorian Andean Spanish, the grapheme is also used to represent the sound.

Parts of Colombia, like the Andean regions of Ecuador, maintain a distinction between representing and representing . This type of distinction is found in southern Antioquia Department and the southeast end of Norte de Santander Department. A greater portion of Andean Colombia maintains the distinction between and . Overall, Colombia presents great variety with regards to .

The same shift from to to (to modern ) historically occurred in the development of Old Spanish; this accounts for such pairings as Spanish vs Portuguese , vs , vs and so on.

Extension of

The distinction between and remains in the Philippines, Andean Ecuador and Peru, Paraguay, both highland and lowland Bolivia, and the northeastern portions of Argentina that border with Paraguay.

The retention of a distinction between and is more common in areas where Spanish coexists with other languages, either with Amerindian languages, such as Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní, which, with the exception of Guaraní, themselves possess the phoneme , or in Spain itself in areas with linguistic contact with Catalan and Basque.

By 1989, several traditionally non- areas, such as Bogotá and much of Spain and the Canaries, had begun rapidly adopting , in the timespan of little more than a single generation. In areas where is variable, is lost more often in rapid and casual speech. There is also idiolectal correlation between and speech rate, with fast-speaking individuals being more likely to be .

has begun appearing in the speech of Ecuador's middle and upper classes.

In Spain, most of the northern half of the country and several areas in the south, particularly in rural Huelva, Seville, Cadiz, and part of the Canaries used to retain the distinction, but has spread throughout the country, and the distinction is now lost in most of Spain, particularly outside areas in linguistic contact with Catalan and Basque. In monolingual, urban northern Spain, a distinction between and only exists among the oldest age groups in the upper classes.

Although northern, rural areas of Spain are typically associated with lack of , and is typically thought of as a southern phenomenon, there are several isolated, rural, Asturleonese-speaking areas where is found even among elderly speakers. These include the valley of Nansa, Tudanca, and Cabuérniga, all in Cantabria. This is evidence that the existence of in the southern half of the Peninsula and beyond may be due to the arrival of Astur-leonese settlers, who already had , and subsequent dialect levelling in newly reconquered southern communities.

Minimal pairs

produces homophony in a number of cases. For example, the following word pairs sound the same when pronounced by speakers of dialects with ''yeísmo'', but they are minimal pairs in regions with the distinction:

* ("beech tree" / "that there be") ~ ("he/she/it finds")
* ("he/she/it fell") ~ ("he/she/it became silent")
* ("pit, hole") ~ ("pot")
* ("berry") / ("that he/she/it go") ~ ("fence")

The relatively low frequency of both and makes confusion unlikely. However, orthographic mistakes are common (for example, writing instead of ). A notable case is the name of the island of : since Mallorcans tend to pronounce intervocalic /ʎ/ as /ʝ/, central Catalan scribes assumed the authentic (and correct) name was another case of this and hypercorrected it to . This new form ended up becoming the usual pronunciation, even for native Mallorcans.

Similar phenomena in other languages

Romance languages

*Standard Portuguese distinguishes , and . Many Brazilian Portuguese speakers merge and , making and both . Some speakers, mainly of the Caipira dialect of Brazil, merge and , making and both . Some Caipira speakers distinguish etymological and , pronouncing ''olho'' and ''óleo'' .
*In French, historical turned into , but the spelling was preserved, hence (, originally ), (, originally ).
* Romanesco and many Northern and Central dialects of Italy have or corresponding to standard Italian .

Other

*In Hungarian, in most dialects turned into , but the spelling was preserved, hence .
*In Swedish, turned into , but the spelling was preserved, hence .
*In Cypriot Greek, is often pronounced as , especially by younger speakers. In Standard Modern Greek, it always surfaces as .

See also

*History of the Spanish language
*List of phonetics topics
*Phonological history of Spanish coronal fricatives ( and )

References

Bibliography

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Further reading

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External links

Yeísmo y su desarrollo en España


Lleísmo

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yeismo
Spanish phonology
Lateral consonants