Castilian Spanish

In English, Castilian Spanish can mean the variety of Peninsular Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain, the standard form of Spanish, or Spanish from Spain in general.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6] In Spanish, the term castellano (Castilian) can either refer to the Spanish language as a whole, or to the medieval Old Spanish, a predecessor to Early Modern Spanish.

Terminology

The term Castilian Spanish is used in English for the specific varieties of Spanish spoken in north and central Spain. This is because much of the variation in Peninsular Spanish is between north and south, often imagined as Castilian versus Andalusian.^[7] Typically, it is more loosely used to denote the Spanish spoken in all of Spain as compared to Spanish spoken in Latin America. In Spain itself, Spanish is not a uniform language and there exist several different varieties of Spanish; in addition, there are other official and unofficial languages in the country, although Spanish is official throughout Spain.

Castellano septentrional ("Northern Castilian") is the Spanish term for the dialects from the Northern half of Spain, including those from Aragón or Navarre, which were never part of Castile. These dialects can be distinguished from the southern varieties of Andalusia, Extremadura, and Murcia.^[8] Español castellano, the literal translation of Castilian Spanish, is not a common expression; it could refer to varieties found in the region of Castile; however, the dialects of Castile, like most dialects, are not homogenous, and they tend to merge gradually with the dialects of other regions.^[9]

Phonology

Word-final /d/ may be pronounced as a voiceless [θ] instead of the standard voiced [ð].^[10] This is most common in the provinces of Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid, the east of León and Zamora, northern Segovia and Ávila, and Soria. This pronunciation is present, though less common, in La Rioja, Guadalajara, Cuenca, and Madrid, and it is scarcely documented in Toledo, Ciudad Real, and Albacete.^[11]
/d/ is elided in the ending -ado throughout nearly all of Spain. In other environments, elision of intervocalic /d/ is characteristic of southern varieties of Spanish.^[12]
Syllable-final /s/ is often aspirated in Madrid and Castilla–La Mancha. Before a /k/ sound, it can be realized as a voiceless velar fricative [x], such that es que 'it's that' sounds like [exke].^[13]
/tʃ/, spelled as ⟨ch⟩, is pronounced as a palatalized voiceless alveolar affricate [t͡sʲ], at least in Madrid.^[14]
Spanish from most of the Iberian Peninsula, including Castile, uses an apical [s̠], as opposed to the non-retracted voiceless alveolar fricative of Andalusian, Canarian, and Latin American Spanish, as well as of English.^[15]^[16]

Grammar

A wide swath of central Castile is home to leísmo. The Royal Spanish Academy considers leísmo to be incorrect, though it considers it to be admissible when referring to a single, male person.^[17]^[18]

References

^ Random House Unabridged Dictionary. Random House Inc. 2006.
^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.). Houghton Mifflin Company. 2006.
^ Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. MICRA, Inc. 1998.
^ "Encarta World English Dictionary". Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2007. Archived from the original on 2009-11-09. Retrieved 2008-08-05.
^ "Castilian". Dictionary.com Unabridged (Online). n.d. Retrieved 2021-04-04.
^ "Castilian". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 2021-04-04.
^ Lipski 2012, p. 2.
^ Lipski 2018, p. 501.
^ Penny 2000, p. 11.
^ Molina Martos, Isabel (December 2016). "Variación de la -/d/ final de palabra en Madrid: ¿prestigio abierto o encubierto?". Boletín de filología (in Spanish). 51 (2): 347–367. doi:10.4067/S0718-93032016000200013.
^ García Mouton, Pilar; Molina Martos, Isabel (1 January 2016). "La –/d/ final en el atlas dialectal de Madrid (ADIM): un cambio en marcha". Lapurdum (in Spanish) (19): 283–296. doi:10.4000/lapurdum.3375. hdl:10261/265245.
^ Estrada Arráez, Ana (2012). "The Loss of Intervocalic and Final /d/ in the Iberian Peninsula" (PDF). Dialectologia. Special Issue III: 7–22. ISSN 2013-2247. Retrieved 25 January 2022.
^ Wright, Robyn (2017). The Madrileño ejke : a study of the perception and production of velarized /s/ in Madrid (PhD). The University of Texas at Austin. hdl:2152/60470. OCLC 993940787.
^ Klaus Kohler. "Castilian Spanish – Madrid".
^ Martnez-Celdrn, Eugenio; Fernndez-Planas, Ana Ma.; Carrera-Sabat, Josefina (December 2003). "Castilian Spanish". Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 33 (2): 255–259. doi:10.1017/S0025100303001373. S2CID 232344066. Retrieved 18 March 2022.
^ Dalbor, John B. (March 1980). "Observations on Present-Day Seseo and Ceceo in Southern Spain". Hispania. 63 (1): 5–19. doi:10.2307/340806. JSTOR 340806.
^ "Uso de los pronombres lo(s), la(s), le(s). Leísmo, laísmo, loísmo". rae.es (in Spanish).
^ Fernández-Ordóñez 2016, p. 390.

Sources

Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés (2016). "Dialectos del Español Peninsular" (PDF). In Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier (ed.). Enciclopedia de Lingüística Hispánica. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. ISBN 9781315713441. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 12, 2020. Retrieved 18 March 2022.
Lipski, John (2012). "Geographical and Social Varieties of Spanish: An Overview" (PDF). In Hualde, José Ignacio; Olarrea, Antxon; O'Rourke, Erin (eds.). The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 1–26. doi:10.1002/9781118228098.ch1. ISBN 9781405198820.
Lipski, John M. (2018). "Dialects of Spanish and Portuguese" (PDF). In Boberg, Charles; Nerbonne, John; Watt, Dominic (eds.). The handbook of dialectology. Hoboken, NJ. pp. 498–509. doi:10.1002/9781118827628.ch30. ISBN 9781118827550.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Penny, Ralph J. (2000). Variation and change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139164566. ISBN 0521780454. Retrieved 21 June 2022.