Published In

Languages

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2022

Subjects

Spanish language -- Pronunciation, Spanish language -- Phonetics, S (The sound), Spanish language -- Variation, Spanish language -- Dialects, Spanish language -- Social aspects, Sociolinguistics

Abstract

The natural tendency for language variation, intensified by Spanish’s territorial growth, has driven sibilant changes and mergers across the Spanish-speaking world. This article aims to present an overview of the most significant processes undergone by sibilant /s/ in various Spanish-speaking areas: devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision, and voicing. Geographically based phonetic variations, sociolinguistic factors, and Spanish language contact situations are considered in this study. The sibilant merger and its chronological development in modern Spanish, along with geographic expansion, have resulted in multiple contemporary dialectal variations. This historical lack of stability in these sounds has marked modern regional variations. Tracing and framing the sibilants’ geo-linguistic features has received much attention from scholars, resulting in sibilants being one of the most studied variables in Spanish phonetics. In this article, we provide a concise approach that offers the reader an updated sociolinguistic view of the modern cross-dialectal realizations of /s/. It is essential to study sibilant development to describe Spanish dialects, the differences between Transatlantic and Castilian varieties, and the speech features found in Spanish speaking communities in the Americas. Examining sibilance from different approaches with a representative variety of Spanish dialects as examples advances the importance of sociolinguistic phenomena to index language changes.

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Language Variation and Change in Spanish)

Rights

Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Creative Commons License

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited.

DOI

10.3390/languages7020077

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/37241

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