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.

Spanish has many allophones, so it is important here to distinguish phonemes (written between slashes / /) and corresponding allophones (written between brackets [ ]).

Consonants

The phonemes /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ are realized as approximants (namely [β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞], hereafter represented without the undertack) 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.

The phoneme /ʝ/ is realized as an approximant 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 palatal fricative in emphatic pronunciations, and is unspecified for rounding (e.g. viuda [ˈbjuða] 'widow' vs ayuda [aˈʝʷuða] 'help'). The two also overlap in distribution after /l/ and /n/: enyesar [ẽ̞ɲɟʝe̞ˈsaɾ] ('to plaster') aniego [aˈnje̞ɣo̞] ('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 Alarcos Llorach (1950) to postulate an archiphoneme /I/, so that ley [lei̯] would be transcribed phonemically as /ˈleI/ and leyes [ˈleʝes] as /ˈleIes/.