Yeísmo

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Yeísmo (Spanish pronunciation: [ʝeˈizmo]) is a distinctive feature of many dialects of the Spanish language, which consists of the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme /ʎ/ (written <ll>) and its merger into the phoneme /ʝ/ (written <y>), usually realized as a palatal fricative or affricate. In other words, <ll> and <y> represent the same sound /ʝ/. The term yeísmo comes from the Spanish name of the letter <y> (i griega or ye). The opposite phenomenon, lleísmo (pronounced [ʎeˈizmo]), is the realization of both as the lateral [ʎ].

Most dialects currently realize the merged phoneme as a voiced palatal fricative [ʝ], which becomes an affricate or a plosive (either a voiced postalveolar affricate [dʒ] as in English gin or a voiced palatal affricate [ɟ͠ʝ]) when it occurs after a pause (as at the beginning of a sentence) or after a nasal (as in the words cónyuge and conllevar). In other dialects, such as Rioplatense, it may be realized as a postalveolar ([ʒ] or [ʃ])

Yeísmo produces homophony in a number of cases. For example, the following word pairs sound the same to speakers of dialects with yeísmo, but would be minimal pairs in regions that distinguish:

• yeísmo ~ lleísmo
• haya ("beech tree" / "that there be") ~ halla ("s/he finds")
• cayó ("s/he fell") ~ calló ("s/he became silent")
• hoya ("pit, hole") ~ olla ("pot")
• baya ("berry") and vaya ("that he go") ~ valla ("fence")

Due to the relatively low frequency of both y and ll, confusion is unlikely. However, orthographic mistakes are common (for example, writing llendo instead of yendo — for some reason, most people tend to err towards ll). A similar effect took place in the local name of the island of Majorca: Mallorca is a continental Catalan hypercorrection of the earlier Maiorca.^[1]

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Rioplatense Spanish
• History of the Spanish language
• List of phonetics topics