Ceceo

From Freepedia

Ceceo is a phenomenon in the Spanish language whereby the voiceless interdental fricative (International Phonetic Alphabet /θ/, the "th" in think) is used in place of the voiceless dental fricative /s/. In that respect, it is not unlike a lisp.

In standard Castilian Spanish, the letter s is always pronounced /s/, whereas the letter c (before the vowels e and i) and the letter z are pronounced /θ/. In all other dialects of Spanish this distinction has been long lost and /θ/ does not exist, being replaced by /s/ in all cases.

For speakers who exhibit ceceo, however, /s/ is replaced by /θ/.

For example, in standard Spanish, la casa ("the house") is pronounced as /la 'kasa/, whereas la caza ("the hunt") is pronounced as /la 'kaθa/. A person with seseo, e.g. from Latin America, pronounces both of these as /la 'kasa/ and a person with ceceo pronounces both of these /la 'kaθa/.

Ceceo most commonly occurs in Andalusian Spanish, but the term is also used to refer to a lisp in other dialects. Rather ironically, ceceo is regularly pronounced /se'seo/ in Latin American Spanish.

The "Castilian lisp"

As stated, true ceceo is simply a dialectal feature, produced by a linguistic development that diverged from that of other dialects. However, urban legend attributes it to a speech defect. According to it, ceceo became common in Castilian because one of the Spanish kings (generally identified as Felipe V or Carlos V) spoke with a lisp, and his courtiers did not want to embarrass him by speaking otherwise.

That the legend is wrong can be seen readily: if speakers of Castilian Spanish spoke with a lisp, they would be unable to pronounce phonemic /s/ as [s] and would substitute [θ] for it, but those two phonemes are pronounced and distinguished consistently.

Origins

Fifteenth-century Spanish had six sibilant phonemes, more than any current variety of Spanish, and those six phonemes merged differently as they evolved into the pronunciation of the modern dialects. There were three pairs of voiceless versus voiced sibilants: dentoalveolar affricates (spelled c/ç vs. z), apicoalveolar fricatives (-ss-/s-/-s vs. -s-), and prepalatal fricatives (x vs. j/g). The first step away from that system was to fricativize the dentoalveolar affricates.

Then, in Castilian Spanish the second step was to losethe voiceless/voiced distinction in favour of the voiceless member, and the final step was to alter the pronunciation of the three resulting phonemes so as to boost their acoustic distinction (because they were used to distinguish many minimal pairs, but phonetically they were too similar and thus prone to cause confusion). The dentoalveolar was moved "forward" to interdental (the sound of th) and the prepalatal was moved "backwards" to velar (the sound of ch in Scottish loch), resulting in the three-way distinction used in modern Castilian: interdental /θ/ (spelled c/z), apicoalveolar /s/ (s, note that this sound of Castilian is different from an English s, because it is pronounced with the tip of the tongue instead of with its blade), and velar /x/ (j/g).

In Andalusian, however, the phonological evolution since the fricativization of the affricates differed from that of Castilian. The second step in Andalusian was to merge the members of the dentoalveolar and apicoalveolar pairs according to voicing, before voicing was lost (the voiceless c/ç and -ss-/s-/-s merged together, and the voiced z and -s- merged together), which resulted in only one merger phoneme /s/ (instead of the two, /θ/ and /s/, that resulted in Castilian) for all of the four original sibilants once the third step (losing voicing) took place. The single phoneme /s/ that resulted from all this merging was pronounced differently in different parts of Andalusia; in some places (areas of seseo), it sounds just like an English s, and this was the pronunciation that reached Latin America; while in others (areas of ceceo), it is a sound that resembles an English th (or Castilian c/z) more than an English s (or Latin American s), but that is coronal instead of interdental (in an English th or a Castilian c/z there is no sibilance, while the sound in "ceceante" Andalusian is a sibilant, that is, it is actually an unusual kind of s rather than a true th). Another widespread misconception is to confuse the use of this particular kind of th-like sibilant in those varieties of Andalusian with lisping.

Ladino has conserved most of the old phonemes and its study has cast light on the evolution of Spanish.

See also

• Contrast ceceo with seseo