Spanish phonology

This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the Spanish language. Unless otherwise noted, statements refer to Castilian Spanish, the standard dialect used in Spain on radio and television. For historical development of the sound system, see History of Spanish. For details of geographical variation, see Spanish dialects and varieties. Phonemes are written inside slashes (/ /) and allophones inside brackets ([ ]). The phonemes /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ are realized as approximants (namely [β̞, ð̞, ɣ˕], hereafter represented without the downtacks) or fricatives in all places except after a pause, after a nasal consonant, or—in the case of /d/—after a lateral consonant; in such contexts they are realized as voiced stops. [In one region of Spain, the area around Madrid, word-final /d/ is sometimes pronounced [θ] especially in a colloquial pronunciation of its name, Madriz (ES-pe - Madrid.ogg)]. The phoneme /ʝ/ is realized as an approximant ʝ˕ in all contexts except after a pause, a nasal, or a lateral. In these environments, it may be realized as an affricate (ɟʝ). The approximant allophone differs from non-syllabic /i/ in a number of ways; it has a lower F2 amplitude, is longer, can only appear in the syllable onset (including word-initially, where non-syllabic /i/ normally never appears), is a fricative ʝ in emphatic pronunciations, and is unspecified for rounding (e.g. viuda Es-viuda.oga 'widow' vs ayuda Es-ayuda.oga 'help'). The two also overlap in distribution after /l/ and /n/: enyesar Es-enyesar.oga ('to plaster') aniego Es-aniego.oga ('flood'). Although there is dialectal and ideolectal variation, speakers may also exhibit other near-minimal pairs like abyecto ('abject') vs abierto ('opened'). There are some alternations between the two, prompting scholars like to postulate an archiphoneme //, so that ley Es-ley.oga would be transcribed phonemically as /ˈle/ and leyes Es-leyes.oga as /ˈlees/. In a number of varieties, including some American ones, a process parallel to the one distinguishing non-syllabic /i/ from consonantal /ʝ/ occurs for non-syllabic /u/ and a rare consonantal /w̝/.