Old Spanish possessed a set of 6 sibilants, namely, 3 pairs that contrasted in place of articulation and voicing:

For a translation of the IPA to the Hispanist Phonetic Alphabet, click here.

For a recording of the sibilants as they would have been pronounced in Mediæval Spanish, click here.

The old sibilants in Castile



In Castile, the process that the six Mediæval sibilants underwent began with the loss of the voicing contrast, merging the voiced members of the pairs with the voiceless ones. The process was in turn followed by the deaffrication of the dental affricate. This left the Spanish of Castile with a system of 3 extremely similar sibilants. Due to their acoustic proximity—which possibly lead to perceptual obscurity and ambiguity—, and in order to make better use of the oral cavity and acoustic space, the voiceless dental fricative was advanced and turned into an voiceless interdental fricative. On the other hand, the voiceless postalveolar fricative was retracted and converted into a voiceless velar fricative. However, since the new velar sound was still perceived as not being distinct enough from one member of the sibilants, namely, the voiceless apical-alveolar fricative, with its peculiar pseudo-palatal quality, the velar sound was further retracted and turned into a voiceless uvular fricative. This completed the development of the sibilants in Castile and Northern Spain.


The old sibilants in Andalusia



In Andalusia, the process took a slightly different turn. The sibilants in Southern Spain, in contrast to what happened in the North, retained the voicing contrast for quite a while. The process in the development of the sibilants began with the deaffrication of the voiced and voiceless dental affricates. This change, in addition to historical evidence suggesting that the Andalusian equivalent of the Castilian alveolar fricative was already being pronounced more or less dentally rather than alveolarly, caused that the resulting deaffricated voiced and voiceless dental fricatives merged, respectively, with the voiced and voiceless dental-alveolar fricatives in favor of the former. This left the system with two pairs of sibilants: the dental fricatives and the postalveolar ones. After this, and just like it had happened in Castile, the contrast between voiced and voiceless was lost. The voiced member of each pair merged with the voiceless one, leaving the system with only two sibilants. Just like in Castile, subsequently, the voiceless postalveolar fricative underwent a retraction and was turned into a voiceless velar fricative. This sound was further relaxed in Andalusia and the south of Spain, and became a voiceless glottal fricative. With this, the development of the sibilants in Southern Spain was completed. Eventually, this was the pronunciation that would be primarily exported to the Canary Islands and Latin American during the Spanish Conquest.


© 2008 Kenneth V. Luna