Spain is letting the lisp die in Andalusia without knowing that the /θ/ sound is a global rarity that we are losing

In recent days, the University of Granada has presented a macroatlas with almost half a million audios that shows how the way of speaking of Andalusians has changed. The research is very interesting for many reasons, but today I want to focus on something specific: the slow, but inexorable agony of lisp.

What is lisp. While the distinction between ‘s”https://www.xataka.com/”z’ and seseo gains ground in the south, lisping is losing speakers in the only place where lisping is used. It is a sociological question, yes: researchers are clear that stigma is the main force against this phonetic subsystem. But there is something else

Because, in reality, what we are seeing is not just the death of the lisp, it is the end of the sound (θ) itself: one of the most unknown oddities of the Spanish language.

A Spanish oddity? Although it is not something that is often explained much, the ‘c’ sound (/θ/) is relatively rare in the world — only in 43 of 566 languages ​​(7.6%) in the world. WALS sampling appears and only in 4% of the counts in typological databases (UPSID: 3.99%; PHOIBLE: ~4%). That is, very few living languages ​​have that sound among their phonetic repertoires.

To give us an idea, the phoneme of the ñ (ɲ), quintessence of Spanish, appears in 35% of the world’s languages.

But… what about the ‘c’? The usual explanation Why (θ)/(ð) are less frequent and why they are disappearing is simple: they are “soft” fricatives; That is, they are less strident sounds than (s)/(z) and, therefore, have less perceptual salience. This is what makes them tend to be lost or transformed easily over time.

That does not mean that the Spaniard of the future is going to be sesante; but there is a high probability that it is sesante.

The heritage of a language in the trash. It is clear that it cannot be argued from a philological point of view that the disappearance of (θ) is a bad thing. The Earth turns, languages ​​change. But it is striking that in a society in which historical heritage continues to be “valued”, the progressive loss of a sound does not set off alarm bells.

And that it does so because we are not capable of accepting the diversity of our own language, normalizing it and defending it in the public sphere, is perhaps worse.

Image | Wiebrig Krakau (Modified)

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