Spanish dialects and varieties


Some of the regional varieties of the Spanish language are quite divergent from one another, especially in pronunciation and vocabulary, and less so in grammar.
While all Spanish dialects adhere to approximately the same written standard, all spoken varieties differ from the written variety, to different degrees. There are differences between European Spanish and the Spanish of the Americas, as well as many different dialect areas both within Spain and within the Americas. Chilean and Honduran Spanish have been identified by various linguists as the most divergent varieties.
Prominent differences in pronunciation among dialects of Spanish include:
  1. the maintenance or lack of distinction between the phonemes and ;
  2. the maintenance or loss of distinction between phonemes represented orthographically by ll and y ;
  3. the maintenance of syllable-final vs. its weakening to , or its loss; and
  4. the tendency, in areas of central Mexico and of the Andean highlands, to reduction, or loss, of unstressed vowels, mainly when they are in contact with voiceless consonants.
Among grammatical features, the most prominent variation among dialects is in the use of the second-person pronouns. In Hispanic America, the only second-person plural pronoun, for both formal and informal treatment, is, while in most of Spain the informal second-person plural pronoun is with ustedes used only in the formal treatment. For the second-person singular familiar pronoun, some American dialects use , while others use either or both tú and vos.
There are significant differences in vocabulary among regional varieties of Spanish, particularly in the domains of food products, everyday objects, and clothes; and many American varieties show considerable lexical influence from Native American languages.

Sets of variants

While there is no broad consensus on how Latin American Spanish dialects should be classified, the following scheme which takes into account phonological, grammatical, socio-historical, and language contact data provides a reasonable approximation of Latin American dialect variation:
While there are other types of regional variation in Peninsular Spanish, and the Spanish of bilingual regions shows influence from other languages, the greatest division in Old World varieties is from north to south, with a central-northern dialect north of Madrid, an Andalusian dialect to the south, and an intermediary region between the two most important dialect zones. Meanwhile, the Canary Islands constitute their own dialect cluster, whose speech is most closely related to that of western Andalusia.
The non-native Spanish in Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara has been influenced mainly by varieties from Spain. Spanish is also an official language in Equatorial Guinea, and many people speak it fluently.
Though no longer an official language in the Philippines, Philippine Spanish has had a tremendous influence on the native tongues of the archipelago, including Filipino.
The Spanish spoken in Gibraltar is essentially not different from the neighboring areas in Spain, except for code-switching with English and some unique vocabulary items. It is frequently blended with English as a sort of Spanglish known as Llanito.
Judaeo-Spanish, a "Jewish language", encompasses a number of linguistic varieties based mostly on 15th-century Spanish; it is still spoken in a few small communities, mainly in Israel, but also in Turkey and a number of other countries. As Jews have migrated since their expulsion from Iberia, the language has picked up several loan words from other languages and developed unique forms of spelling, grammar, and syntax. It can be considered either a very divergent dialect of Spanish, retaining features from Old Spanish, or a separate language.

Pronunciation

Distinción vs. seseo and ceceo

The distinction between and is maintained in northern Spain and in south-central Spain, while the two phonemes are not distinguished in the Americas, the Canary Islands, the Philippines and much of Andalusia. The maintenance of phonemic contrast is called distinción in Spanish. In areas that do not distinguish them, they are typically realized as, though in parts of southern Andalusia the realization is closer to ; in Spain uniform use of is called ceceo and uniform use of seseo.
In dialects with seseo the words and are pronounced as homophones, whereas in dialects with distinción they are pronounced differently. The symbol stands for a voiceless sibilant like the s of English sick, while represents a voiceless interdental fricative like the th of English thick.
In some cases where the phonemic merger would render words homophonic in the Americas, one member of the pair is frequently replaced by a synonym or derived form—e.g. caza replaced by, or , homophonic with , replaced by. For more on seseo, see González-Bueno.

Yeísmo

Traditionally Spanish had a phonemic distinction between and . But for most speakers in Spain and the Americas, these two phonemes have been merged in the phoneme. This merger results in the words and being pronounced the same, whereas they remain distinct in dialects that have not undergone the merger. The use of the merged phoneme is called "yeísmo".
In Spain, the distinction is preserved in some rural areas and smaller cities of the north, while in South America the contrast is characteristic of bilingual areas where Quechua languages and other indigenous languages that have the sound in their inventories are spoken, and in Paraguay.
The phoneme can be pronounced in a variety of ways, depending on the dialect. In most of the area where yeísmo is present, the merged phoneme is pronounced as the approximant, and also, in word-initial positions, an affricate. In the area around the Río de la Plata, this phoneme is pronounced as a palatoalveolar sibilant fricative, either as voiced or, especially by young speakers, as voiceless.

Variants of

One of the most distinctive features of the Spanish variants is the pronunciation of when it is not aspirated to or elided. In northern and central Spain, and in the Paisa Region of Colombia, as well as in some other, isolated dialects, the sibilant realization of is an apico-alveolar retracted fricative, a sound transitional between laminodental and palatal. However, in most of Andalusia, in a few other areas in southern Spain, and in most of Latin America it is instead pronounced as a lamino-alveolar or dental sibilant. The phoneme is realized as or before voiced consonants when it is not aspirated to or elided; is a sound transitional between and. Before voiced consonants, is more common in natural and colloquial speech and oratorical pronunciation, is mostly pronounced in emphatic and slower speech.
In the rest of the article, the distinction is ignored and the symbols are used for all alveolar fricatives.

Debuccalization of coda

In much of Latin America—especially in the Caribbean and in coastal and lowland areas of Central and South America—and in the southern half of Spain, syllable-final is either pronounced as a voiceless glottal fricative, , or not pronounced at all. In some varieties of Latin American Spanish, this may also occur intervocalically within an individual word—as with, which may be pronounced as —or even in initial position. In southeastern Spain, the distinction between syllables with a now-silent s and those originally without s is preserved by pronouncing the syllables ending in s with ; this typically affects the vowels, and, but in some areas even and are affected, turning into. For instance, , can be pronounced, or even . This vowel contrast is sometimes reinforced by vowel harmony, so that casas 'houses' differs from casa not only by the lack of the final in the former word but also in the quality of both of the vowels. For those areas of southeastern Spain where the deletion of final is complete, and where the distinction between singular and plural of nouns depends entirely on vowel quality, it has been argued that a set of phonemic splits has occurred, resulting in a system with eight vowel phonemes in place of the standard five.
In the dialects that feature s-aspiration, it works as a sociolinguistic variable, being more common in natural and colloquial speech, whereas tends to be pronounced in emphatic and slower speech. In oratorical pronunciation, it depends on the country and speaker; if the Spanish speaker chooses to pronounces all or most of syllable-final , it is mostly voiced to before voiced consonants.

Vowel reduction

Although the vowels of Spanish are relatively stable from one dialect to another, the phenomenon of vowel reduction—devoicing or even loss—of unstressed vowels in contact with voiceless consonants, especially, can be observed in the speech of central Mexico. For example, it can be the case that the words , , and sound nearly the same, as. One may hear pronounced. Some efforts to explain this vowel reduction link it to the strong influence of Nahuatl and other Native American languages in Mexican Spanish.

Pronunciation of ''j''

In the 16th century, as the Spanish colonization of the Americas was beginning, the phoneme now represented by the letter j had begun to change its place of articulation from palato-alveolar to palatal and to velar, like German ch in Bach. In southern Spanish dialects and in those Hispanic American dialects strongly influenced by southern settlers, rather than the velar fricative, the sound was backed all the way to, like English h in hope. Glottal is nowadays the standard pronunciation for j in Caribbean dialects as well as in mainland Venezuela, in most Colombian dialects excepting Pastuso dialect that belongs to a continuum with Ecuadorian Spanish, much of Central America, southern Mexico, the Canary Islands, Extremadura and western Andalusia in Spain. In the rest of Spain, alternates with a uvular fricative allophone, which may also be trilled. In the rest of the Americas, the velar fricative is prevalent. In Chile, is fronted to when it precedes the front vowels and : , ; in other phonological environments it is pronounced or .
For the sake of simplicity, these are given a broad transcription in the rest of the article.