Phonetic Features
- As most of ancestors of Hispanic Americans came from Latin America, ⟨z⟩ and ⟨c⟩ (before /e/ and /i/) are pronounced as, the same as ⟨s⟩. However, seseo is also typical on the speech of Hispanic Americans of Andalusian and Canarian descent. Andalusia's and the Canary Island's predominant position in the conquest and subsequent immigration to Latin America from Spain is thought to be the reason for the absence of this distinction in most Latin American dialects. Most Americans of Spanish descent pronounce the 2 letters as .
- Spanish in United States usually features yeísmo—that is, there is no distinction between ⟨ll⟩ and ⟨y⟩, and both are . Yeísmo is an expanding and now dominant feature of European Spanish, a common feature of Andalusia and Canary Islands. Speakers of Rioplatense Spanish pronounce both ⟨ll⟩ and ⟨y⟩ as or . The traditional pronunciation of the digraph ⟨ll⟩ is preserved in some dialects of speakers from the Andes range, especially in Peru and Colombia highlands, and all Bolivia and Paraguay, and Spain.
- Most speakers may debuccalize syllable-final /s/ to, or drop it entirely, so that está ("s/he is") sounds like or, as in southern Spain (Andalusia, Murcia, Canary Islands, Ceuta and Melilla).
- The ⟨g⟩ (before /e/ or /i/) and ⟨j⟩ is usually as in most southern Spanish speeches; while it may be in other dialects of Latino Americans and often firmly strong (rough) in Peruvian Spanish dialect, this is a common feature of Castilian Spanish.
- In many Caribbean speeches the phonemes /l/ and /r/ at the end of a syllable sound alike or can be exchanged: caldo > cado, cardo > cado.
- The voiced consonants /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ are pronounced as plosives after and sometimes before any consonant in most of Colombian Spanish dialects (rather than the fricative or approximant that is characteristic of most other dialects). Thus pardo, barba, algo, peligro, desde —rather than the, of Spain and the rest of Spanish America. A notable exception is the Department of Nariño.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Language In The United States
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