Spanish: An Essential Grammar

rozado worn/grazed rosadopink

maza meat tenderizer masadough

This phenomenon, which is known as seseo, is more or less universal in Latin

America. It is also normal in much of southern Spain and the Canary islands.

Pronunciation of ‘ll’

In conservative varieties of central and northern Peninsular Spanish, the ll

sequence of letters is pronounced somewhat like the ‘lli’ of ‘million’.

However, speakers in Latin America (excluding Paraguay and parts of the

Andes), as well as in the Canaries and much of southern Spain, universally

adopt the more modern practice of pronouncing lllike ‘y’ as in English ‘yes’.

This phenomenon is known as yeísmoand among speakers who adopt it

word pairs such as the following will have an identical pronunciation:

pollo chicken poyostone bench

halla he/she finds hayathere is (present subjunctive of haber)

In the River Plate area, i.e. Buenos Aires and Montevideo together with

their hinterland, both lland yare pronounced like the ‘s’ of English ‘plea-

sure’ or, increasingly, like the ‘sh’ of English ‘shut’. Both of these

phenomena, which are essentially a distinctive form of yeísmo, are referred

to as zˇeísmoor rehilamiento.

Pronunciation of ‘j’

In the Spanish spoken in most of the Iberian Peninsula, with the notable

exception of Andalusia, the letter j(and also gbefore ior e) is pronounced

like the ‘ch’ of the Scottish word ‘loch’. On the other hand, in large parts

of Latin America, particularly in the Caribbean basin and on the Pacific

coast of South America, j(and gbefore ior e) is pronounced like the ‘h’

in English ‘hat’. In these areas, the word paja ‘straw’, for example, will be

pronounced as paha.

Forms of address

Perhaps the most striking difference between the Spanish of the Iberian

Peninsula and that of Latin America relates to the verb forms and personal

30.2

30.1.3

30.1.2

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2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

1011

1

12111

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

20111

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

30111

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

40

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30

Differences
between
Latin
American and
Peninsular
Spanish

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