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 + Consonant phonemes Labial Dental Alveolar Post-alv./Palatal Velar Nasal Stop Continuant*() Lateral * Tap Trill
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 continuant allophones of Spanish have been traditionally described as voiced fricatives (e.g. , who (in §100) describes the air friction of as being "tenue y suave" ('weak and smooth'); ; ; and , who describes as being "...with audible friction"). However, they are more often described as approximants in recent literature, such as ; ; and . The difference hinges primarily on air turbulence caused by extreme narrowing of the opening between articulators, which is present in fricatives and absent in approximants. displays a sound spectrogram of the Spanish word abogado showing an absence of turbulence for all three consonants.
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" (sometimes spelled "žeísmo"). In the last few decades, it has further become popular, particularly among younger speakers in Argentina and Uruguay, to de-voice to ("sheísmo"/"šeísmo").
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. In many varieties it may be pronounced as [h] 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,For example , and is post-velar or uvular in the Spanish of northern and central Spain., cited in Otherssuch as 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 .
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.
+ Assimilatory nasal and lateral allophones in Spanish nasal lateral word IPA gloss word IPA glossinvierno'winter' ánfora 'amphora' encía 'gum' alzar 'to raise' antes 'before' alto 'tall' ancha 'wide' colcha 'quilt' cónyuge 'spouse' rincón 'corner' enjuto 'thin'
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 before consonants 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 ('give rocks' (2nd sg. imperative informal) 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 . This is consistently fricative, whereas the allophone of varies between a fricative and an approximant, like , and . In strict IPA, they would be written as and , respectively. Such voicing may occur across word boundaries, causing ('Merry Christmas') to be pronounced . 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 realization of the phoneme. 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').