Sheísmo in Montevideo Spanish: Not (yet) identical to Buenos Aires

Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (pp. 54–63), 2008

This study of palatal production in Argentina confirms that there are three types of speakers (voicers, devoicers, and variable devoicers) in Buenos Aires. Furthermore, the results indicate that 30 years after Fontanella de Weinberg's (1978) study of palatals, variation between voiced and voiceless allophones of the palatal phoneme is still correlated with age, but no longer with gender. The fact that the youngest generation almost invariably uses voiceless variants now suggests that a sound change from voiced to voiceless is already complete. Though the innovation of voiceless variants may have started with older speakers, younger speakers appear to be responsible for its rapid spread and have generalized it to the point of being the dominant variant in Buenos Aires today.

2015

As is well known, Argentine Spanish demonstrates žeísmo, i.e., the voiced palatal phoneme /ʝ/, standard for most Spanish dialects, is realized as a voiced alveopalatal fricative [ʒ] or its voiceless counterpart [ʃ]. The variation of [ʒ] and [ʃ] has been shown to be conditioned by social factors such as sex, age, and social class (Wolf & Jimenez, 1977; Fontanella de Weinberg, 1978). The devoicing of [ʒ] has been described as a change in progress, led by younger, middle class, female speakers, and spreading to other groups in the populations studied (Wolf, 1984; Chang, 2008; Rohena-Madrazo, 2008, for Buenos Aires). The present study builds upon previous sociolinguistic analyses of žeísmo and takes a step towards a more comprehensive view of Argentine Spanish by investigating the allophonic variation in two lesser studied regional dialects of Argentina-Córdoba and Tucumán-as well as Buenos Aires. Spontaneous speech was collected from speakers in each of these three regions by use of a role-play elicitation exercise (La encuesta porteña, Gabriel et al, 2010). An acoustic analysis of the pronunciation of orthographic <y> and <ll> (in word-initial and intervocalic positions) measured duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity for these and surrounding segments of speech to describe voicing as a gradient production across regional and gender groups. Results show that females are devoicing more than males in Córdoba and Tucumán, with the most voiced productions coming from both genders of speakers in Córdoba. Males and females in Buenos Aires were not statistically different from one another, and these males devoiced significantly more (40% voicing) than those from Córdoba and Tucuman (both 95% voicing). This study presents the first recorded acoustic data for Tucumán, belonging to the northwest dialectal zone, and data for Córdoba, contributing to the very few publications with respect to this phenomenon (cf. Colantoni, 2005; Castellani, 1998). Additionally, the present study provides an acoustic analysis which considers the gradient nature of devoicing and quantifies the productivity of voicing among speakers from diverse populations.

Selected Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, 2011

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev * We would like to express our appreciation and thank to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and salient suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. All errors that remain are our own.

2022

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. Keywords: Spanish sibilants, Spanish /s/, devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision

Selected Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology, Edited by Scott M. Alvord, Cascadilla, 2011

Link to full text: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/larp/5/paper2631.pdf This paper systematically investigates the phonological process of voicing assimilation of the sibilant in Mexican Spanish whereby /s/ is produced as [z] based on the voicing of the following consonant (for example, /mismo/ [mizmo] 'same'). Twelve college aged (21-29 years) native Mexican speakers attending the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, Mexico, and recorded in Mexico City provided the data. The instrument for the study was a contextualized picture description task presented in a PowerPoint format, which allowed for the systematic investigation of the contexts of /s/ in intervocalic position and in coda position followed by a voiceless or voiced consonant; these contexts were also examined by phrase position. Findings indicate that /s/ voicing before a voiced consonant is not a categorical process in Mexican Spanish and that factors associated with variability in /s/ voicing include the sex of the speaker and phrase position. The paper also documents the consistent, albeit small in duration, manifestation of progressive voicing from the preceding vowel into the sibilant, not previously documented for Spanish.

Language & Communication, 1983

2015

Spanish Phonetics and Phonology in Contact. Studies from Africa, the Americas, and Spain, 2020

Along the Uruguayan-Brazilian border, Spanish exhibits phonological influence from Portuguese, including the realization of intervocalic /d/ as a stop. Using conversational data from 40 bilinguals, we analyze tokens of intervocalic /d/ acoustically using a consonant-vowel intensity ratio according to multiple social factors and their interactions. The results suggest that, while interactions are present (with stops being favored by Portuguese-preferring professional females), the main effects of social factors predominate. Younger speakers are moving away from the use of stop-like productions and toward the pan-Hispanic norm of variation between approximants and deletion. Portuguese-preferring speakers make greater use of stop-like variants, as do females, which is explained by the linguistic behaviors of the four women who produced /d/ with the highest intensity ratios.

Journal of Linguistics, 2013

This paper presents new experimental data on Quito Spanish /s/-voicing, which has attracted considerable interest from theoretical phonologists owing to the overapplication of voicing to word-final pre-vocalic /s/. Bermú dez-Otero (2011) singles out Quito /s/-voicing as an important test case for discriminating between two competing theories of phonology-morphosyntax interactions : Output-output correspondence and cyclicity. Overapplication in /s/-voicing cannot be captured using correspondence relationship to a base form, which challenges Output-output correspondence as a theory of opacity. However, the argument only holds insofar as word-final prevocalic /s/-voicing is considered phonological, as Output-output correspondence can account for /s/-voicing assuming that it only applies in the phonetics (Colina 2009). We discuss the diverging empirical predictions concerning categoricity and gradience in the surface realisation of voicing processes. We further test these predictions based on acoustic data from seven speakers of Quito Spanish. Evidence from speech rate manipulations shows that some speakers produce more voicing during frication at normal speech rate, compared to fast, maintaining a stable voicing ratio across different speech rates. We argue that for these speakers, /s/-voicing is optional but categorical, and so it ought to be analysed as phonological. This result presents a [1] We would like to thank the speakers for their participation in the experiment. We are also grateful to Ricardo Bermú dez-Otero, Yuni Kim, Koen Sebregts and three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for their comments and suggestions.