Yeísmo

(; literally "Y-ism") is a distinctive feature of many dialects of the Spanish language, characterized by the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme (written ) and its merger into the phoneme (written ). 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 fricative , 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 voiced postalveolar fricative ; this is referred to as .

The sound itself may have originated in Argentina and Uruguay as an influence from the local Amerindian languages on the colonial Spanish spoken by the area's inhabitants of that time; the pronunciation then persisted after the mass immigration of post-colonial Italians, Germans, Spaniards and more into the region, which effectively transformed the region's demographics and affected various aspects of the Spanish language there, including (most noticeably) intonation. Prior to this post-colonial mass immigration wave, like most other South American countries, the populations of Argentina and Uruguay 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.

Both and are types of , which refers only to the lack of a phonemic distinction between and , not to any particular phonetic realization of the merged phoneme.

Comparatively, within the Ecuadorian Sierra region (spanning from the Imbabura to the Chimborazo Provinces, where the pronunciation of /ʎ/ as survives among the majority population of colonial-descended mestizos), the sibilant has not merged, as in Argentina and Uruguay; a distinction is also maintained, but with representing , rather than the original Spanish sound, and representing . The shift from /ʎ/ to in this region of Ecuador is theorized to have occurred long before the 20th century, and affected both Ecuadorian Spanish and Quechua; historically (through the early 17th century), Spanish speakers in this area had maintained distinctions between , /ʎ/, . This three-way distinction is still present in the Quechua of more southerly regions, such as the Azuay province, which uses the graphemes , , and to distinguish between these phonemes. In the orthography of several Ecuadorian dialects of Quechua, under the influence of the orthography of Ecuadorian-Andean Spanish, the grapheme is also used to represent the sound.

Parts of Colombia, similarly to 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.

Geographic extent

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 Paraguay. Parts of Chile that neighbour Bolivia are traditionally non-.

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, except for Guaraní, themselves possess the phoneme , or in Spain itself in areas with linguistic contact with Catalan and Basque. The presence of non- areas in parts of south-central Chile may likewise be associated with the geographical overlap of the Mapuche.

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

By 2009 there was evidence that had begun appearing in the speech of Ecuador's middle and upper classes. In south-central Chile was already dominant in the first half of the 20th century but grew further at the expense of non- areas over the course of the century.

In Spain, most of the northern half of the country and several areas in the south, particularly in rural Huelva, Seville, Cádiz, 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 , but they are minimal pairs in regions with the distinction:

* ("governess") / ("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 (verb) and both . Some speakers, mainly of the Caipira dialect of Brazil, merge and , making and both . Some Caipira speakers distinguish etymological and , pronouncing and .
*In standard French, historical turned into , but the spelling was preserved, hence (, originally ), (, originally ).
* Romanesco and a number of Southern and Central dialects of Italian