Variation in Palatal Production in Buenos Aires Spanish

Argentine Spanish is well-known among varieties of Spanish for its “hardened” palatals. The sonorant palatals of European Spanish have undergone fortition in most dialects of Argentine Spanish, resulting in fricatives or affricates in all environments. In one recent study focusing on Buenos Aires, Colantoni (2006) examined the change from sonorant /j/ to obstruent /ʒ/ in some detail. However, when walking through Buenos Aires today, one actually hears voiceless [ʃ] more often than voiced [ʒ], a fact that might be behind marked discrepancies among layperson impressions of these sounds. On the one hand, many popular authors indicate that the predominant pronunciation of palatals in Argentina is voiced. For instance, Bao and Greensfelder (2002: 187) claim that “most Argentines say ‘zh’ for [‘y’] and for ‘ll’”, while others make reference to the “replacement of the ‘ll’ and ‘y’ sounds by a soft ‘j’ sound, as in ‘beige’” (Dilks 2004: 25) and to “the unique way in which porteños [Argentines from Buenos Aires] pronounce the letters ll and y (with a sound akin to the French ‘je’)” (Tozer 2001). Very recent publications present similar thoughts, stating that “Argentine Spanish differs from other countries in its pronunciation of the ll and y not as a y but as English speakers would pronounce a j” (Luongo 2007: 59). Lawrence (2007: 367) concurs that “the local accent imposes a soft ‘j’ sound on the ‘ll’ and ‘y’”, such that “llave (key) sounds like ‘zha-ve’ and desayuno (breakfast) sounds like ‘de-sazhu-no’” (Luongo et al. 2007: 421). On the other hand, some authors suggest that the predominant pronunciation of palatals in Argentina has become either partially or completely voiceless. Greenberg (2000: 15) asserts that “the ‘y’ becomes a combination of ‘z’ and ‘sh’”, a statement echoed by McCloskey (2006: 395–396), who describes and as “somewhere between ‘ch’ and ‘zh’”, a sound “not pronounced in English”. Finally, Palmerlee et al. (2005: 489–496) call attention to “the trait of pronouncing the letters ll and y as ‘zh’ (as in ‘azure’)”, but then say that is pronounced “as the ‘sh’ in ‘ship’ when used as a consonant” and consistently transcribe both and with ‘sh’ (e.g. calle ‘street’ = “ka·she”, desayuno ‘breakfast’ = “de·sa·shoo·no”). These differing descriptions of Argentine palatals suggest that there is a high degree of variation in the phonetic realization of the palatal phoneme in Argentine Spanish. The nature of this variation is what is examined in the present study, which uses acoustic analysis to investigate the realization of palatals in a small sample of speakers from the Buenos Aires area. In the following sections, I review technical work that has been done on this topic, present new data on variation in palatal production and its sociolinguistic correlates, and conclude that a change from voiced to voiceless is already complete.