How badly the <insert variety here> speak! (1) Lambdacism.
s I tell you one thing, I tell you another. In at least one article on this blog, but I'm quite sure it's been several, I've written that Spanish speakers are quite tolerant of mistakes that someone learning Spanish might make. Too tolerant, I'd say, to the point where we don't help. Because if someone learning Spanish tells us a sentence full of errors but we understand the message, the most likely feedback is "how well you speak Spanish!" But among ourselves, we're not like that. We criticize each other for things that aren't even errors: accents, idioms, the words we use to name certain things, and a long etcetera. We even argue about the name of the language: whether it's español or castellano, when all of us who speak this language understand both words perfectly and use them. To the point that, and I've actually heard this, there are people who say they don't understand other native speakers of the language because of their accent. A lie. To illustrate this last point, I have an example. There's a myth that the Spanish spoken in Chile is incomprehensible to those of us who aren't Chilean. I know many Chileans, and I never had problems communicating with any of them. In Spanish, of course—it's not like we resorted to another common language. Even Chileans themselves can come to think this: once, a professor I had in a course I took, Chilean himself, who gave us classes speaking in "Chilean Spanish," something we all understood, told us, referring to his variety of Spanish:
– No, what’s spoken in Chile isn’t Spanish.
So much for the catharsis. Spanish is a language spoken in many countries and has influences from many languages. From Amerindian languages, from other European languages, from African languages, etc. From my humble point of view, the language, thanks to or because of the Internet, is going to tend toward, or is tending toward, universalization. A few days ago, to give an example, being in Tacuarembó, a city in northern Uruguay that I frequently travel to for family reasons, a lady in a supermarket asked me a question about aguacates. In Uruguay we call them paltas, and the lady was Uruguayan, I can assure you. That someone would spontaneously say aguacates a few years ago was unthinkable in Uruguay. But that’s my theory. The point is that in current Spanish there are varieties that present different linguistic phenomena, particularly we’ll focus on phonetic ones, for which we Spanish speakers criticize each other. Sometimes out of pure malice, sometimes because some varieties amuse us. Yes, some ways of pronouncing Spanish amuse me too. In this small series of articles we’ll see some of them, starting with lambdacism. And if you, little grasshopper, happen to be reading this article and speak a variety of Spanish in which one says mi amol “instead of” mi amor, don’t get angry with me. In the next article of this small series we’ll talk about yeísmo rehilado, the phenomenon by which in my variety of the language we say posho, shuvia, sho and shevo. In which, moreover, we use voseo. So relax, there will be criticism for everyone :).
Soy de Puelto Lico.
A mistake we native Spanish speakers make when we want to imitate the accent of people from a variety where lambdacism occurs is pronouncing all -r’s as if they were -l’s. This isn’t so. Those who pronounce this way lateralize the pronunciation of -r in implosive position, that is, at the end of syllables or at the end of words. Which all end with the end of a syllable, right? And, moreover, -rr is never lateralized. So no, native Spanish speaker, Puerto Ricans say Puelto Rico. I close the paragraph without further ado.
Origin and geographical distribution.
The origin of lambdacism in current Spanish isn’t entirely clear. While examples appear in the evolution of the language from Latin to Spanish, such as the Latin words arbor and marmor that became árbol and mármol, the reason why this phenomenon exists today in Caribbean Spanish, for example, is still a source of discussion. It’s thought that it may have appeared due to the influence of the many Andalusian and Canarian colonists in the region, as well as it may exist due to the influence of African languages that don’t have the -r phoneme, so those speakers assimilated it to -l. The fact is that today this phenomenon can be seen, broadly speaking, in some variants of Andalusian Spanish and, above all, in Caribbean Spanish.
While the exact historical origin of this phenomenon in current Spanish remains under discussion, the reality is that -r and -l are liquid consonants, called so because air flows with less difficulty than in other consonantal sounds, such as fricatives or plosives. Having much in common from a phonological point of view, they are sounds that are easy to confuse or assimilate with each other, so that in the evolution from Latin to different languages two phenomena occurred: the one that concerns us here, lambdacism, and rhotacism, which is the inverse phenomenon, that is, changing some -l’s to -r’s, which also still exists in some varieties of Spanish. For you to hear examples, I recommend looking for audios or videos of people from countries like Cuba or Puerto Rico, for example, to hear real samples. I could try to recreate the pronunciation and upload audios here, but it wouldn’t be the exact pronunciation.
The result of this phenomenon, in practice, is that -r’s at the end of syllables are pronounced with a sound that isn’t exactly an -l, but rather a sound that’s intermediate between that of -r and -l but which, when heard, sounds more like an -l. Thus, words like harto or puerta sound something like halto and puelta, and all words ending in -r, such as all infinitive verbs, also: comel, cantal, bailal. This phonetic change doesn’t hinder communication between people who apply it and people who don’t, and it gives the language a sound that, personally, I love. But… Yes, there’s always a but.
How badly they speak!
Something we humans have is that we tend to reject, or point out, what’s different. In many aspects of life. And linguistics is no exception. And in linguistics, moreover, it’s very difficult to determine that something is wrong. Because one speaks as one speaks in the place where one acquired their language. I myself spent most of my life thinking that my variant of Spanish is wrong because we pronounce differently and because we say vos instead of tú. Until I started becoming interested in languages and linguistics and began learning my own language. In the particular case of lambdacism, yes, it’s a linguistic phenomenon that carries stigma. There are many people who think that those who speak this way speak poorly. But no. They simply speak as they speak, and like all linguistic phenomena of all languages, it’s simply an outcome of the evolution of the language itself, and if anything, it enriches it.
While the central theme of this article was lambdacism, it’s not such a complex linguistic phenomenon to understand, so I took advantage to include information and comments that have little to do with that. In the next article in this series we’ll see another phonetic phenomenon of the Spanish language that’s usually the target of memes: yeísmo rehilado. That one that occurs in my own variety of the language.
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