Background

Language Family: Indo-European / Italic / Romance / Italo-Western / Western / Gallo-Iberian / Ibero-Romance / West-Iberian / Castilian

Spanish has over 483 million native speakers around the world, though it is mainly spoken in Spain and parts of Latin America. Because Spanish is so broadly spoken, a number of dialects exist with slight phonemic inventory variations. (Standard) Castilian Spanish is represented below.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Stops	p b	t̪ d̪			k ɡ
Affricates				tʃ
Fricatives	f	θ	s	ʝ	x
Nasals	m		n	ɲ
Trills			r
Flaps			ɾ
Approximants	w		l	ʎ
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

Varieties of Spanish differ in whether or not sequences of vowels are realized separately or as diphthongs. Even in varieties that do have preferences for diphthongs, the same sequences may be realized differently in different words. For example, in the word ‘biólogo’ there is a hiatus between /i/ and /o/, but in ‘radiólogo,’ ⟨i⟩ and ⟨o⟩ form the diphthong /jo/ (Chitoran and Hualde 2007, 45–46). Because the rules for diphthongization are not consistent across or even within Spanish dialects, I will not account for them in my rules. That is, accented vowels will be transcribed to their plain representations. This results in a compromised language.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

Note: Presently, ⟨x⟩ is used to denote the sequence /ks/; however, the once corresponding phoneme /x/ is still retained in some proper names such as México (Coester 1925, 111–12). In the rule set, although I have accounted for such occurrences, it might not be exhaustive.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
b	/b/
c	/k/; /θ/	/θ/: preceding front vowels
d	/d̪/
e	/e/
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/; /x/	/x/: preceding front vowels
h	∅	silent
i	/i/
j	/x/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
ñ	/ɲ/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/ɾ/; /r/	/r/: word-initially
s	/s/
t	/t̪/
u	/u/
v	/b/
w	/w/
x	/ks/; /s/; /x/	/s/: word-initially; see note above about /x/
y	/ʝ/
z	/θ/
Digraph
ch	/tʃ/
ll	/ʎ/
rr	/r/
gu	/ɡ/	preceding front vowels
gü	/ɡw/	preceding front vowels
qu	/k/	preceding front vowels

Lenition Rules

/s/ can be deleted or aspirated in the coda or word-final position (Vasilescu et al. 2018, 2729).
/s/ may become voiced preceding voiced consonants (Schmidt and Willis 2011, 1).
/n/ may be deleted or velarized word-finally (Salcedo 2010, 203–4).
/b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ often spirantize (Martnez-Celdrn, Fernndez-Planas, and Carrera-Sabat 2003, 257).
/x/ is realized as [h] by some speakers (ibid.).

Misc. Rules

Nasals assimilate to the place of the following obstruent in fast speech (Harris 1967, 8–19).
/l/ becomes a dental when preceding /t̪/ or /d̪/ (Harris 1967, 20).
/r/ can be lateralized in the coda or word-final position (Salcedo 2010, 204).
In Chicano Spanish, the first vowel in a vowel sequence in deleted (Salcedo 2010, 207).

References

Chitoran, Ioana, and José Ignacio Hualde. 2007. “From Hiatus to Diphthong: The Evolution of Vowel Sequences in Romance.” Phonology 24: 37–75. doi:doi:10.1017/S095267570700111X.

Coester, Alfred. 1925. “México or Méjico?” Hispania 8 (2). American Association of Teachers of Spanish; Portuguese: 109–16.

Harris, James W. 1967. “Spanish Phonology.” PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/12999.

Martnez-Celdrn, Eugenio, Ana Ma. Fernndez-Planas, and Josefina Carrera-Sabat. 2003. “Castilian Spanish.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 33 (2). Cambridge University Press (CUP): 255–59. doi:10.1017/s0025100303001373.

Salcedo, Claudia S. 2010. “The Phonological System of Spanish.” Revista de Lingüística Y Lenguas Aplicadas 5.

Schmidt, Lauren B., and Erik W. Willis. 2011. “Systematic Investigation of Voicing Assimilation of Spanish /S/ in Mexico City.” In Selected Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology, edited by Scott M. Alvord.

Vasilescu, Ioana, Nidia Hernandez, Bianca Vieru, and Lori Lamel. 2018. “Exploring Temporal Reduction in Dialectal Spanish: A Large-Scale Study of Lenition of Voiced Stops and Coda-S.” Interspeech 2018, 2728–32. doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1256.

Spanish

Abi Creighton