{"id":21205,"date":"2025-09-23T02:37:23","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T00:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/conexionsp.com\/que-mal-hablan-los-insertar-variedad-aqui-ii-el-yeismo-rehilado-o-sea-yo\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T05:43:27","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T03:43:27","slug":"how-badly-the-insert-variety-here-speak-el-yeismo-rehilado-that-is-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/conexionsp.com\/en\/how-badly-the-insert-variety-here-speak-el-yeismo-rehilado-that-is-me\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a1How badly the <insert variety here> speak! (II) El ye\u00edsmo rehilado. That is, me."},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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have a friend who always says that, in any situation, it's better to be in second place than in first, because many people want to knock down the person in first place, while the person in second place... gets ignored. In other words, it's better to go unnoticed than to be the one everyone's looking at. And I'm lucky to be Uruguayan, and regarding the linguistic phenomenon we'll discuss today, we Uruguayans are in second place... out of two. We are so few in such a small country by Latin American standards that we simply go unnoticed. No one mentions us in the "fights" that happen online between Latin Americans about how words are pronounced, about what to call palta or aguacate (avocado), etc. Except to call us Dinoguay in soccer memes. Dino from dinosaur (dinosaurio), because we won our last World Cup when Cleopatra was ruling Egypt. Were there still dinosaurs at that time?\nWe get "ignored" because we're a small country, and because Argentina exists. Argentinians are one of the best things that could have happened to us Uruguayans. There are many more of them than us - 44 million versus 3.4 million - a huge country with a reputation for being arrogant. We are a scarce commodity; when people hear us speak in other Spanish-speaking countries, they usually ask if we're Argentinians. In fact, out of the thousands of times someone has asked me my nationality, only once did someone ask "Argentinian or Uruguayan?" And we have a reputation for being humble. For being nice guys :). The fact is that, in reality, Uruguayans and Argentinians are basically the same people and we share a phonological trait, the ye\u00edsmo rehilado, which occurs throughout Uruguay and in parts of Argentina, mainly in the littoral region, Buenos Aires, and southern Argentina. The thing is that all the criticism for this way of pronunciation on the Internet goes to the Argentinians, and we go unnoticed. So, in this new article in this little series, we'll see how badly Argentinians speak \ud83d\ude09 and this time I'll be able to give you pronunciation examples, because I'm a specialist.<\/p>\n\t<\/div>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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El ye\u00edsmo rehilado<\/em>\u00a0is, moreover, one of those characteristics of the Spanish language, like lambdacism<\/strong><\/a>, which we saw in the previous article of this series, that makes people who speak other varieties of the language consider that those of us who speak this way speak badly. Just a few days ago, I made a comment on a video from a Spanish language channel that I love, and I had the following exchange:<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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It’s a real exchange. These are screenshots from my Facebook profile – yes, Federico Altuna Gaud\u00edn is me. I covered the name of the person who made the comment to me because it’s clear they didn’t do it maliciously, but out of curiosity, because my idea with this blog is to share my language and culture and not bother anyone, and because I know this is the reality: even many people who speak my variant of the language think we speak badly. I myself thought so, until I started delving into languages, and started learning my own language, and was able to understand that, in linguistics, it’s actually very difficult to assert that something is wrong. Because one speaks as one speaks where one lives. And in phonetics this is even more difficult, in my opinion. If tomorrow I stopped pronouncing y<\/em> and ll<\/em> with rehilamiento while living in my country, no one would tell me I had improved my Spanish – no, on the contrary, they would probably make fun of me. Because this is how we speak, it’s our variety of the language, and if I tried to modify it to sound more “neutral” I would be doing something artificial. Something false.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The RAE Dictionary defines ye\u00edsmo<\/em> as the “disappearance of the phonological difference between the palatal lateral consonant and the voiced palatal fricative, so that, in pronunciation, words like callado<\/em> (quiet) and cayado<\/em> (shepherd’s staff) are not distinguished”. That is, ye\u00edsmo<\/em> implies that y<\/em> and ll<\/em> are pronounced the same way. Ye\u00edsmo<\/em> is a very widespread phenomenon in current Spanish: broadly speaking, in some Andean regions and in some parts of Spain, the phonological distinction is preserved, and generally these are regions with influence from other languages – Amerindian in America and Spanish regional languages in Spain. The sound that was lost in ye\u00edsta<\/em> zones is the lateral palatal consonant, which corresponded (and corresponds in non-ye\u00edsta<\/em> zones) to that of ll<\/em>, and the most… neutral… standard pronunciation… actually I don’t know what word to use, would be the voiced palatal fricative, although this sound can be approximant rather than fricative in articulation and sound almost like the i<\/em>. It should be noted that in the case of y<\/em>, we’re referring to y<\/em>s that go at the beginning and in the middle of words. The y<\/em> at the end of words, as in rey<\/em> (king), and the conjunction y<\/em> (and) sound like the vowel i<\/em>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Let’s use the words that the RAE uses in its Dictionary to hear these sounds. It’s me speaking. To get the awkwardness over with quickly, let’s first listen to the lateral palatal consonant sound, which although it’s a sound that belongs to my language, is very foreign to my variety of it, and I find it difficult to pronounce. If a Catalan hears this audio, they’re free to laugh.<\/p>

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