Andalusian Spanish
Contents
1. Introduction
Andalusia was the last region in Spain to be wrested from Moorish control. It is presumably
for this reason that a Hispanized version of the old Arabic term Al-Andalus, which originally applied to
the whole of Islamic Spain, has survived as the regional name. The actual
reconquest of Andalusia was carried through in several stages, with the western
and northe
rn cities (Córboba, Jaén, Seville and Cádiz) falling to the Christians
in the thirteenth century, but the mountainous kingdom of Granada in the west holding
out until 1492.
Despite the extended North African presence in the region, the modern Andalusian population is largely descended from Castilians who settled the area after it was reconquered and from the autochthonous Christian population (referred to as Mozarabs, < Arabic musta‘rab) that had inhabited the region from before the Moorish invasion of the eighth century. The Mozarabs originally spoke Mozarabic, a continuation of spoken Latin, but by the late Middle Ages this variety of Romance appears to have close to extinction, having been displaced by a combination of Arabic on the one hand and other forms of Ibero-Romance, including Castilian, on the other.
Neither Mozarabic nor Arabic appears to have exercised significant structural influence on Andalusian varieties of Spanish, although it seems reasonable to suppose that there was at least some lexical borrowing. It should be noted, however, that virtually all the Spanish words that are of Arabic origin – almohada ‘pillow’, albañil ‘mason/builder’, alcalde ‘mayor’ etc. – are general Spanish words and hence are not specific to the Andalusian dialect.
The distinctive character of Andalusian Spanish should thus be seen as resulting primarily from internal sound change rather than from language contact. The first documented evidence of divergence from Castilian Spanish is from the early sixteenth century, but in all probability the process was underway long before that time.
2. Pronunciation
2.1 Seseo and ceceo
Probably the best-known feature of Andalusian Spanish – one that it shares with Canary Island
and Latin American Spanish – is the merger of the coronal fricative phonemes /s/ and /θ/, which in Castilian Spanish correspond to the letters s and z (or c before i or e) respectively. In the speech of many Andalusian speakers, this merger is manifested as seseo, whereby the sibilant /s/ replaces the non-sibilant /θ/. In such dialects, su aceite ‘his/her oil’, for example, is pronounced [swaˈsejte]. Alternatively, ceceo may be observable, whereby /θ/ is used in place of /s/, as in
[θwaˈθejte]. The latter phenomenon is less stable than seseo, with speakers often articulating a sound that is on the margin between /s/ and /θ/ and also having a tendency to code-switch between ceceo and the Castilian pattern of distinción, i.e. the system in which both /s/ and /θ/ exist as separate phonemes.
The /θ/ of Andalusian ceceante dialects may not be completely identical with the equivalent sound in Castilian Spanish (corresponding to the letter z, or to c before e or i). However, it is recognizably a non-sibilant articulated at the dental place of articulation, meaning that the best match in terms of the International Phonetic Association’s consonantal inventory is [θ] rather than [s], or any subcategory of the latter. Hualde (2005: 153) notates the sound using [θ] modified by the IPA’s dental diacritic, describing it as being ‘dentalized’ and ‘less sibilant’ than the (laminal) /s/ deployed in seseo.
A further reason for associating Andalusian /θ/ with its Castilian counterpart is that both sounds descend from the same phoneme, namely the Old Spanish voiceless dental affricate /ts/, found for example in the word cabeça ‘head’, which was pronounced [kaˈbetsa]. The /ts/ corresponding to the letter ç in this word – z in the modern orthography – has evolved to /θ/ in both Castilian Spanish and in those varieties of Andalusian Spanish that have ceceo: [kaˈβeθa] cabeza.
Traditionally ceceo is associated with southern Andalusia, as is indicated in the map below, with seseo predominating in northern Andalusia and in a small island around the metropolis of Seville city. In broad terms, this probably holds true for the present day, but in coastal capitals like Cádiz and Málaga seseo is arguably the commoner of the two phenomena.
The origin of ceceo and seseo
In addition to the voiceless dental affricate /ts/, mentioned above, Old Spanish had a voiced dental affricate, /dz/, which was represented in the orthography by the letter z (not to be confused with the modern letter z, which, as just noted, stands for a voiceless phoneme). For example dezir, the forerunner of modern decir ‘to say’, was pronounced [deˈdziɾ]. Both /ts/ and /dz/ were deaffricated at an unspecified time during the late Middle Ages and, while it is impossible to know for certain how their fricative reflexes were pronounced, it seems likely that, to begin with at least, they were (laminal) denti-alveolar sibilants, viz. voiceless /s̪/ and voiced /z̪/ respectively. (For an overview of the medieval situation, see the beginning of Section 3 in Mackenzie 2022).
In the Andalusian Spanish of the late Middle Ages, these denti-alveolar sibilants merged with and displaced the (apical-)alveolar sibilants /s/ and /z/, which traditionally in Spanish were the sounds corresponding to orthographic ss and s respectively. Following this merger, not only were words like cabeça and dezir pronounced with denti-alveolar fricatives ([s̪] and [z̪]) in Andalusian Spanish, as they were in the Castilian dialect, but so too were words like passo ‘step’ (modern spelling: paso) and casa ‘house’, which in Castilian Spanish continued to be pronounced with (apical-)alveolar fricatives. Subsequently, during the sixteenth century, /z̪/ was lost, leaving, in the relevant subdialects, just /s̪/ as the unique reflex of the medieval phonemes /ts, dz, s, z/. This is the outcome that has come to be known as seseo.
What we now think of as Andalusian ceceo – in contradistinction to seseo – is said to have arisen when the above-mentioned /s̪/, by then the unique reflex of /ts, dz, s, z/ in the Andalusian dialect, evolved (in certain areas) into /θ/, replicating to an extent what occurred to the same sound in Castilian Spanish. According to Penny (2000: 119–120) the evolution of Andalusian /s̪/ into /θ/ occurred in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries and began in the coastal regions of Andalusia. However, it may well be more consistent with the known data points to analyse this development as having taken place during the course of the sixteenth century; that is, after the time that Castilian /θ/ came into existence but before the time when the term ceceo began to be used to refer to the dialectal pronunciation of s as c (see the quotation from Covarrubias below). The cause of the development /s̪/ > /θ/, both in Castilian and Andalusian, is discussed in Mackenzie 2022 (see in particular Section 6.4).
In broad terms, therefore, what characterises the seseante and ceceante dialects of Andalusian Spanish is that, in principle, they exhibit no residue of the earlier distinction between the dental affricates (/ts/ and /dz/) and the apical-alveolar fricatives (/s/ and /z/). In the modern era, this phenomenon is analysed into the subphenomena of seseo and ceceo, although originally only the latter term, or rather the verb cecear (often spelled çeçear), was used to characterize this aspect of Andalusian speech.
Interestingly, before being applied to Andalusian Spanish, the verb çeçear/cecear was used generally to denote an unspecified speech disorder, probably either stammering or lisping, a sense that is nicely illustrated in the extract below from the thirteenth-century General Estoria.
& quemos en somo dela lengua de guisa que dalli tomo por que siempre ceceo despues quando fablaua.
‘And he [Moses] burned the top of his tongue, and to this event he [Josephus] attributed the fact that he lisped/stammered afterwards whenever he spoke.’
(General Estoria I, fol. 137v)
The more recent, implicitly phonological sense of this verb, together with that of the related noun ceceo, is not unambiguously attested until the early seventeenth century, by which time it refers to the tendency to pronounce the letter s as if it was a c preceding i or e, a sound also written at the time as ç. Thus Covarrubias in his Tesoro of 1611 observes that ‘otros [Reynos] pronuncian la c por la s [. . .] lo que comúnmente llaman cecear’ (‘other [kingdoms] pronounce s as c, which is commonly called cecear’).
There is an earlier, ambiguous reference to Andalusian ceceo/çeçeo, by the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, writing in the late 1560s apropos of an encounter in 1519 with a captain from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Cádiz province:
El capitán Luys Marín fue de buen cuerpo e menbrudo y esforçado; era estevudo y la barba algo rrubia, y el rostro largo y alegre, eçeto que tenya unas señales como que abía tenido birgüelas; sería de hasta treynta años quando acá pasó, era natural de San Lúcar; çeçeava vn poco como sebillano; fue buen ginete y de buena conbersaçión; murió en Mechuacán.
‘Captain Luis Marín was well built, powerful and brave; he was bow-legged with a rather light beard and a long, happy face, except that it bore some marks suggesting he had had the pox. He must have been about thirty years old when he came here and he was originally from Sanlúcar. He çeçeo-d a bit like someone from Seville. He was an accomplished horseman and good company. He died in Michoacán.’
(Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, 1568)
The observation that the captain çeçeava, together with the suggestion that this was normal in Seville (probably the province rather than the city), is certainly suggestive. Most probably, however, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, himself from Old Castile, was simply commenting disparagingly on Luis Marín’s pronunciation rather than making a statement about his phonemic inventory.
In short, it is probably unwise to equate historical ceceo/çeçeo with ceceo in the modern sense, at least until the beginning of the seventeenth century; prior to that time, the term appears to have been used rather loosely to denote either an articulation disorder or general mispronunciation. On the other hand, given the nature of modern ceceo, it is easy to see how the original lisping sense of the term evolved naturally into the modern, phonological sense once the unique reflex of /ts, dz, s, z/ in the Andalusian dialect had evolved (in the relevant areas) into /θ/.
As regards the term seseo, this was originally used in respect of Valencian speech, where it referred to the converse merger to ceceo, i.e. one in which apical-alveolar /s/ and /z/ (subsequently just /s/) had displaced the reflexes of the medieval dental affricates. Presumably the term was applied to Andalusian Spanish by analogy with ceceo/çeçeo, to refer to the case in which the relevant merger had delivered a sibilant outcome rather than a nonsibilant one, viz. /θ/. Self-evidently, the fact that in the Andalusian case the sibilant in question was denti-alveolar – viz. [s̪] – rather than apical-alveolar (as it was in the Valencian dialect) was not sufficiently salient as to prevent this re-application of the term.
2.2 Consonantal weakening
Another
dominant theme of Andalusian Spanish is consonantal weakening. In
syllable-initial position, this is reflected in the realization of /x/ as [h]
(as in [ˈpaha] paja ‘straw’), in a tendency towards eliminating intervocalic or
pre-liquid voiced obstruents (as in [besˈtio] vestido ‘dress’ and [ˈmaɾe] madre ‘mother’) and in so-called CH-lenition, the realization of /tʃ/ as [ʃ] (as in [ˈnoʃe] noche ‘night’).
In syllable-final position, the weakening theme is
reflected primarily in phenomena relating to /s/ and the liquids.
Syllable-final
/s/ may be realized as [h] (as in [ehˈpaɲa] España),
it may be elided (as in [laˈola] las olas ‘the waves’), or there may be a process of assimilation
vis-à-vis the following consonant. When the following consonant is a voiceless
obstruent or a sonorant, the output of the process is usually a geminate, as in
[eloˈβippo] el
obispo ‘the bishop’ or [ˈmimmo] mismo ‘same’. With voiced obstruents, on the other hand, the output
is usually a single (voiceless) consonant: [laxaˈʝinah] las
gallinas ‘the hens’, [laˈɸolah] las
bolas ‘the balls’.
Among some
speakers, elision of final /s/ may be accompanied by a lowering of the tongue
position during the articulation of the preceding vowel. As a consequence, the
morphological value expressed in standard Spanish by final /s/ comes to be marked
by vowel quality. For example, the distinction between mano ‘hand’ and manos ‘hands’ comes to be reflected in a vowel quality opposition, viz. [ˈmano] ~ [ˈmanɔ]. In the same way, the distinction between tiene ‘he/she has’ and tienes ‘you have’ is indicated by the contrast between [e] and [ɛ]: [ˈtjene] ~ [ˈtjenɛ]. This process, which Spanish commentators usually refer to as a case of desdoblamiento fonológico (‘phonemic split’), is characteristic of Eastern Andalusian varieties of Spanish.
As regards syllable-final liquids, the trueque ‘confusion’ of [ɾ] and [l] is a notable feature of much unmonitored speech, with the tap [ɾ] often appearing where orthography calls for [l] and, less commonly, the lateral appearing in words which in the standard language have the tap: [baɾˈkon] balcón ‘balcony’, [aɾβaˈɲi] albañil ‘builder’, [ˈkwelpo] cuerpo ‘body’. In word-final position, liquids are frequently elided, as in the albañil example just given.
2.3 Retention of [h] < Latin f
Finally,
the retention of [h] as a reflex of initial or post-prefix Latin /f/, as in [ahoˈɣaɾ] ahogar (< Lat. offocare ‘strangle’), is sometimes a feature of vernacular Andalusian
Spanish. It is certainly one that regularly finds its way into
representations of ‘deep’ Andalusian culture. For example the popular term for Flamenco music is cante jondo [ˈkante ˈhondo], which literally means ‘deep singing’. Spanish hondo ‘deep’ comes from Latin fundum, the initial f having no reflex in standard Spanish but surviving as [h], designated orthographically by the letter j, in the relevant speech varieties.
3. Grammar
An emblematic feature of Andalusian Spanish – in the west at least
– is the use of ustedes as the unmarked second-person plural subject pronoun,
i.e. in those contexts where Castilian Spanish has vosotros/-as. Among educated speakers, ustedes is always accompanied by third-person plural verb endings, although in
vernacular speech, combinations such as ustedes
habláis ‘you speak’, ustedes coméis ‘you eat’ etc. are not uncommon.
In eastern
Andalusia – especially in the provinces of Granada and Almería – ustedes is usually limited to being a deferential pronoun, as in the Castilian standard.
4. Lexicon
Items that
are characteristically Andalusian include the following: cachete ‘buttock’, cortijo ‘farm’, achancar ‘leave speechless’, churri ‘feeble/vapid’, arrevolver ‘to stir’, arrobal (= a unit of land measurement), azotea ‘roof terrace’, cachirulo ‘small pot’, cansino ‘tiresome’, cobija ‘blanket’, chuchurri(d)o ‘wilted’, escupidera ‘chamberpot’, gachón ‘charming/spoilt’, gazpachuelo (= soup-like dish with eggs), malaje ‘malign/disagreeable’, salmorejo (soup-like dish made with bread, garlic, tomatoes etc.), tabarro/tábarro ‘nuisance’, tejeringo ‘churro/fritter’, embuste ‘lie’,
esmayado ‘starving’.
5. References
Aldrete, Bernado de. 1614. Varias antigüedades de España, África y otras provincias. Antwerp: Juan Hasrey.
Armstrong, Nigel and Ian Mackenzie. 2018. ‘Speaker variables in Romance: when demography and ideology collide.’ In Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics, ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Janice Carruthers, pp.173–196. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Guitarte, Guillermo. 1992. ‘Cecear y palabras afines.’ In Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española. Tomo I, Madrid, Pabellón de España, pp. 127-164.
Hualde, José Ignacio. 2005. The sounds of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lapesa, Rafael. 1981. Historia de la lengua española (9th edition). Madrid: Gredos.
Lipski, John M. 1994. Latin American Spanish. London: Longman.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1958. Manual de gramática histórica española (10th edition). Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Nebrija, Elio Antonio de. 1492. Gramática castellana (BNE INC/2142).
Penny, Ralph. 2000. Variation and change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Penny, Ralph. 2002. A history of the Spanish language (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.