Campos de Castilla by cuellar
Whenever students of Spanish discuss the accent of speakers in the country of Spain, they often (incorrectly) describe that accent as a lisp in contrast with the Latin American variants of Spanish.
It’s okay if you thought that
This idea isn’t without basis, though. It’s natural to think Castilian pronunciation is lispy because in English, such a speech condition affects the production of sounds represented by the letters “s” and “z” (/s/ and /z/, respectively). People who lisp often replace a /s/ or /z/ with the sound represented in English by “th” (/θ/ or /ð/). Those who imitate lispers tend to say things like “I thpeak with a lithp, thorry.”
Also, at least in America, we all learn Latin American pronunciation in Spanish class—a pronunciation that doesn’t include the “th” (/θ/) sound. The three letters in question in this post (ce, ese, and zeta) are all pronounced like the English letter “s.” So when people who have been taught that ce and zeta make the same sound as ese, and they hear Castilians using /θ/ in place of /s/, they assume that this also applies to the ese as well.
However, charges of lisping fall apart because Castilians are able to create the /s/ sound in addition to realizing ce and zeta as “lispy.” Although the ese is a bit more whistle-like than Latin American eses, the existence of the sound in the Castilian dialect alongside the interdental (English “th” sound) one refutes the lisp description.
So why the, erm, lispiness?
It may be all fine and dandy that Castilian pronunciation isn’t technically a lisp, but this leaves you asking why it seems so lispy, especially since you might have heard the legend that King Ferdinand mandated that his subjects copy his lisp. In short, Castilians pronounce ce (before i and e) and zeta interdentally for the same reason that the language spoken in the Iberian peninsula is no longer the same tongue that Roman legions and Cicero talked in: language changes over time.
To demonstrate, I’ll use three words that differ in their middle consonant: caza (“hunt”), casa (“house”), and caja (“box”). (In linguistics we call this sort of example a minimal pair, but since I’m using three words, I wasn’t sure if minimal triplet was proper.)
Let’s take a time-travelling galleon to late-sixteenth century Spain, skipping the development of Spanish sounds from Vulgar Latin through medieval Castilian (whew!). Back then,
- caza was pronounced /kas̪a/ (that little bridge underneath the /s/ means that the tongue is right up against the teeth rather than along the alveolar ridge, as it is normally; think the starting position of “ts” but don’t pronounce the “t”)
- casa was pronounced /kasa/ (as it is today)
- and caja was pronounced /kaʃa/ (phonetic English: “kasha”)
Ralph Penny (in A History of the Spanish Language) notes that in later years, “[t]he dental and prepalatal phonemes changed locus, because of the great functional load placed upon the contrast of locus which separated /s̪/, /s/, and /ʃ/” (100). Basically, these three sounds as shown in the words above were so close together that they sometimes lead to confusion; there simply wasn’t enough contrast between the words caza and casa or between casa and caja.
So, to fix this confusion, Spanish speakers (in the central-northern part of the country) shifted
- the dental /s̪/ (represented by ce before i and e, and zeta) in caza forward so that it became interdental, like the English “th” (/θ/)
- they kept the regular “s” in casa where it was
- and they shifted the “sh” sound (represented by jota) in caja to the back of the mouth for the sound it has today: /x/, similar to the English “h” but exactly like the Scottish “ch” in Loch
What is significant is that this shift did not occur elsewhere in the country, especially in Andalucía and the Canary Islands, from which many explorers and conquistadores came to colonize the Americas. In fact, the dental “s” merged with the regular “s.” Spanish speakers in the New World subsequently inherited this pronunciation, which U.S. learners of the language typically use as well.
We have come full circle now. I’ve tried to avoid overly-technical linguistic terms in this explanation, but if it doesn’t make sense, please comment below!
References
- Azevedo, Milton M. Introducción a la Lingüística Española. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2009. 222-223.
- Penny, Ralph. A History of the Spanish Language. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002. 98-103.
