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.
Phonemes are written inside slashes and allophones inside brackets.

Consonants

The phonemes,, and are realized as approximants or fricatives in all places except after a pause, after a nasal consonant, or—in the case of —after a lateral consonant; in such contexts they are realized as voiced stops.
The phoneme is realized as an approximant in all contexts except after a pause, a nasal, or a lateral. In these environments, it may be realized as an affricate. The approximant allophone differs from non-syllabic in a number of ways; it has a lower F2 amplitude, is longer, can only appear in the syllable onset, is a palatal fricative in emphatic pronunciations, and is unspecified for rounding. The two also overlap in distribution after and : enyesar aniego

Consonant neutralizations

Some of the phonemic contrasts between consonants in Spanish are lost in certain phonological environments, and especially in syllable-final position. In these cases the phonemic contrast is said to be neutralized.

Sonorants

Nasals and laterals
The three nasal phonemes—,, and —maintain their contrast when in syllable-initial position. In syllable-final position, this three-way contrast is lost as nasals assimilate to the place of articulation of the following consonant—even across a word boundary; or, if a nasal is followed by a pause rather than a consonant, it is realized for most speakers as alveolar . Thus is realized as before labial consonants, and as before velar ones.
Similarly, assimilates to the place of articulation of a following coronal consonant, i.e. a consonant that is interdental, dental, alveolar, or palatal.
Rhotics
The alveolar trill and the alveolar tap are in phonemic contrast word-internally between vowels, but are otherwise in complementary distribution. Only the trill can occur after,, or , and word-initially. After a stop or fricative consonant, only the tap can occur.
In syllable-final position, inside a word, the tap is more frequent, but the trill can also occur with no semantic difference—thus arma may be either or .
In word-final position the rhotic is usually:
When two rhotics occur consecutively across a word or prefix boundary, they result in one trill, so that da rocas and dar rocas 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.

Obstruents

The phonemes,, and become voiced before voiced consonants as in jazmín , rasgo , and Afganistán . There is a certain amount of free variation in this so that jazmín can be pronounced or.
Both in casual and in 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 -bt- and -pt- in the words obtener and optimista are pronounced exactly the same way:
Similarly, the spellings -dm- and -tm- are often merged in pronunciation, as well as -gd- and -cd-:
FrontCentralBack
Close
Mid
Open

Spanish has five vowels,,, and . Each occurs in both stressed and unstressed syllables:
Nevertheless, there are some distributional gaps or rarities. For instance, an unstressed close vowel in the final syllable of a word is rare.
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. 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

Phonetic nasalization occurs for vowels occurring between nasal consonants or when preceding a syllable-final nasal, e.g. cinco .
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. la madre vs. las madres . 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 more broad variants, only the symbols are used, and that is the convention adopted in this article as well.
Tomás Navarro Tomás describes the distribution of said eleven allophones as follows:
According to Eugenio Martínez Celdrán, however, systematic classification of Spanish allophones is impossible due to the fact that 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 as diphthongs, there is still lexical contrast between diphthongs and hiatus. There are also some lexical items that vary amongst speakers and dialects between hiatus and diphthong: words like biólogo with a potential diphthong in the first syllable and words like diálogo with a stressed or pretonic sequence of and a vowel vary between a diphthong and hiatus. hypothesize that this is because vocalic sequences are longer in these 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 as in poeta and maestro . Similarly, the relatively rare diphthong may be reduced to in certain unstressed contexts, as in Eufemia,. In the case of verbs like aliviar, diphthongs result from the suffixation of normal verbal morphology onto a stem-final . This contrasts with verbs like ampliar which, by their verbal morphology, seem to have stems ending in. Spanish also possesses triphthongs like and, in dialects that use a second person plural conjugation,,, and .
Non-syllabic and can be reduced to,, as in beatitud and poetisa , respectively; similarly, non-syllabic can be completely elided, as in. The frequency of this phenomenon differs amongst dialects, with a number having it occur rarely and others exhibiting it always.

Prosody

Spanish is usually considered a syllable-timed language. Even so, stressed syllables can 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 occurs on the penultima 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, stress falls on the ultima and antepenultima.
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, whereas regular words are underlyingly phonologically marked with a stress feature .
In addition to exceptions to these tendencies, particularly learned words from Greek and Latin that feature antepenultimate stress, there are numerous minimal pairs which contrast solely on stress such as sábana and sabana, as well as límite, limite and limité.
Lexical stress may be marked orthographically with an acute accent. This is done according to the mandatory stress rules of Spanish orthography, which are similar to the tendencies above 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 mi, and mí. In such cases, the accent is used on the homophone that normally receives greater stress when 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, 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, amongst sequences of clitics suffixed to a verb, the rightmost clitic may receive secondary stress, e.g. búscalo .

Alternations

A number of alternations exist in Spanish that reflect diachronic changes in the language and arguably reflect morphophonological processes rather than strictly phonological ones. For instance, a number of 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 and respectively:
Likewise, in a very small number of words, alternations occur between the palatal sonorants and their corresponding alveolar sonorants . This alternation does not appear in verbal or nominal inflection. This is the result of geminated and of Vulgar Latin degeminating and then depalatalizing in coda position. Words without any palatal-alveolar allomorphy are the result of historical borrowings.
Other alternations include ~ , ~ . 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.

Phonotactics

Spanish syllable structure can be summarized as follows; parentheses enclose optional components:
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. The following restrictions apply:
Maximal onsets include transporte, flaco, clave.
Maximal nuclei include buey, Uruguay.
Maximal codas include instalar, perspectiva.
In many dialects, a coda cannot be more than one consonant in informal speech. Realizations like,, are very common, and in many cases, they are allowed even in formal speech.
Because of the phonotactic constraints, an epenthetic is inserted before word-initial clusters beginning with but not word-internally, thereby moving the initial to a separate syllable. The epenthetic is pronounced even when it is not reflected in spelling. While Spanish words undergo word-initial epenthesis, cognates in Latin and Italian do not:
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 enlace. For a brief discussion contrasting Spanish and English syllable structure, see.

Acquisition as a first language

Phonology

varies greatly by individual, 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 a discrimination on one level, he/she will also be capable of making the discriminations of all prior levels.
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 the adult phonology, but 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 are cluster reduction, liquid simplification, and stopping. Less common patterns 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 do the lead voicing contrast between and. 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 be produced in Spanish and as a result 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 very difficult for those learning Spanish as a second language, sometimes taking over a year to produce properly.

Codas

One research 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, 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 fricative with the palatal lateral approximant into one phoneme, 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 among the younger population; the change 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 . However, speakers in Latin America, Canary Islands and some parts of southern Spain have only , which in southernmost Spain is pronounced and not .

Realization of

The phoneme has three different pronunciations depending on the dialect area:
  1. An alveolar retracted fricative sounds a bit like English and is characteristic of the northern and central parts of Spain and is also used by many speakers in Colombia's Antioquia department.
  2. A alveolar grooved fricative, much like the most common pronunciation of English, is characteristic of western Andalusia, Canary Islands, and Latin America.
  3. An dental grooved fricative , 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 in eastern Andalusia like in Granada, Huelva, Córdoba, Jaén and Almería. It occurs only in dialects with ceceo.
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. In many places, it debuccalizes to in final position, or before another consonant so the change occurs in the coda position in a syllable.
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 following it in the 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. In Eastern Andalusian and Murcian Spanish, word-final, and regularly weaken, and the preceding vowel is lowered and lengthened:
A subsequent process of vowel harmony takes place so lejos is, tenéis is and tréboles is or.

Coda simplification

Southern European Spanish and several lowland dialects in Latin America exhibit more extreme forms of simplification of coda consonants:
The dropped consonants appear when additional suffixation occurs. Similarly, a number of coda assimilations occur:
Final dropping is general in most dialects of Spanish, even in formal speech.
The deletions and neutralizations show variability in their occurrence, even with the same speaker in the same utterance, so nondeleted 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 , sed , zigzag. However, word-final is rare, and even more so. They are restricted mostly to loanwords and foreign names, such as the first name of 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.

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.

Sample

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

Orthographic version

El Viento del Norte y el Sol discutían por saber quién era el más fuerte de los dos. Mientras discutían, se acercó un viajero cubierto en un cálido abrigo. Entonces decidieron que el más fuerte sería quien lograse despojar al viajero de su abrigo. El Viento del Norte empezó, soplando tan fuerte como podía, pero entre más fuerte soplaba, el viajeró más se arropaba. Entonces, el Viento desistió. Se llegó el turno del Sol, quien comenzó a brillar con fuerza. Esto hizo que el viajero sintiera calor y por ello se quitó su abrigo. Entonces el Viento del Norte tuvo que reconocer que el Sol era el más fuerte de los dos.

Phonemic transcription

Phonetic transcription