How do you treat different dialects and accents in your TL?

[aokoye]

Almost all languages have dialects and accents.

Save for languages spoken in a single very very small region I would assume all of them do.

[Systematiker]

Like Iversen, I treat several "dialects" as languages.

Most relevant is my experience with German - my standard German certainly has the flavor of accent and construction that a speaker from the South has, to the point that when I'm mistaken for a native speaker it's usually as one from one of two regions. I care way more about idiomatic usage applied where I have the most connection than I do proper standardized usage in speech. I had strong reasons to associate with this usage, though, so it wasn't a random choice. For a third, I'm familiar with the influence it has on standardized German and copy those usages in the appropriate context, but haven't studied it independently.

The things said about Spanish are also certainly true - I think the variety of usage and accent was something that tripped me up a lot in the past (and still takes some getting used to when I run into unfamiliar stuff) due to covering the same ground ( in vocabulary and in receptive ability) repeatedly.

[Saim]

Castilian lisp.

It's not a lisp, anymore than when you lisp when you say the words "thin", "strength", "through" or "three" in English. It's just the phoneme /θ/.

Other than that I agree with you on the most appropriate way to approach Spanish dialectal diversity.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Receptive skills - I listen to/watch whatever native content I get exposed to. We already have a lot of varieties in my native Swedish (and for instance English) so I'm used to hearing people speaking with different accents and other vocabulary. Pavement/sidewalk.

Productive skills - I model my speech after the variety I've had most exposure to and/or I like the most, but generally adapt to the person in front of me. The end result? Either - or neither! I was once told that I had a Dublin accent in Irish - I've spent most of my Irish speaking hours in Donegal, but may have heard more Dublin Irish newscasts, who knows? (And, who cares...).

[stormj]

It's not a lisp, anymore than when you lisp when you say the words "thin", "strength", "through" or "three" in English. It's just the phoneme /θ/.

Other than that I agree with you on the most appropriate way to approach Spanish dialectal diversity.

A lisp is a kind of speech defect where sibilants are rendered into other sounds. Lisping the phoneme /s/ can desibilize it to /th/. So, yes, it is a lisp. The lisping of /s/ in Spanish Z, C, and in the south S, creates the phoneme theta. Saying it's not a lisp ignores the process. English TH did not come from /s/. Afaik, that is an original PIE phoneme, which didn't survive into Latin, if even into Italic, except perhaps in a few Greek borrowings.

The story about the lisping king may be apocryphal, but someone somewhere started it (and it wasn't a Classical Latin speaker) by deviating from Romance sibilants.

Tl;dr it's not a speaker's personal lisp, but it is a result of lisping.


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I deal with dialects of Spanish by trying to learn to understand all of them and varying my speech depending on where I am, but mostly sticking with a generic Mexican newscaster speech when in doubt. I'm not trying to fool anyone that I am native, but I do prefer to sound educated and be understood and don't use gratuitous slang or localisms to show off.

[Saim]

A lisp is a kind of speech defect where sibilants are rendered into other sounds. Lisping the phoneme /s/ can desibilize it to /th/. So, yes, it is a lisp. The lisping of /s/ in Spanish Z, C, and in the south S, creates the phoneme theta. Saying it's not a lisp ignores the process.

First of all, the use of the phoneme /θ/ (not /th/; that doesn't exist in Spanish, although [tʰ] exists in some dialects for intervocalic /st/) in Spanish is not a speech defect. Castilian Spanish speakers easily contrast /s/ and /θ/ in exactly the same way speakers of (most of) English, Albanian or Modern Standard Arabic do.

Second, the underlying phoneme is not /s/. The realignment of Old Castilian sibiliants, giving the three different solutions we find in the modern language (seseo, ceceo and distinción), is much more complex than that.



S1 represents an apicoalveolar s.
S2 represents a laminodental s.

Accents with distinción maintain this distinction (hence the name), having fronted the laminodental s to the fully dental /θ/, mainting the apicoalveolar s. Accents with seseo fronted the apicoalveolar s instead, giving us a single phoneme /s/. So it's essentially the same process, just in different directions and with one of them (distinción) being slightly more conservative in that it preserves both phonemes albeit in a different form.

Standard Basque (euskara batua) also maintains this distinction without fronting laminodental s to /θ/, with the apicoalveolar s being written as <s> and the laminodental one <z>. Not sure about other varieties of Basque.

The story about the lisping king may be apocryphal,

May be?

[stormj]

Yes, yes. You busted me for not being able to type a theta on my phone. My apologies.

The point is, while you can push a wall of text to "ackshually" people out of calling it a lisp, there's really no purpose in doing so other than to be haughty about it. People call it a lisp because it is exactly the same effect as one. Yes, it's more complex than all of that. Yes, Spanish speakers can distinguish between the two sounds. So can, I imagine, most people with an actual speech defect inasmuch as it's a speech defect and not a listening one.

Seseo is indeed certainly a "lisping" of /s/ from Latin. And I'm not sure what Basque or Arabic have to do with any of this other than to be the source of that "lisping" process. Furthermore, all your chart does is point out that at some point this came about as a change. I think what I wrote is that the 'th' sound (God forbid I don't type in the exact IPA code here, because being understood is less important than making my posts look like an academic journal article) in English is a sound that goes back to PIE, I think. At least to PG. It didn't come from something else, whatever that something else is. We kept it and the voiced version. I believe the Icelanders kept it. Not sure who else. (Greek?)

You want to argue semantics. Fine. You seem offended that this term gets used with the Iberian Spanish by the hoipolloi, but it's really not all that off base, as it reflects the difference between how those same letters are rendered in virtually all of the nearby Romance languages, the vast majority of Spanish speakers themselves, and English speakers.

The story about the lisping king may be apocryphal,


May be?

You do understand, right, that I was granting that it does in that phrasing. R-right? If so, that was a rather gratuitous shot there.

And while you can poke fun at the apocryphal tale of the lisping king, did you ever stop to think why such a story was invented in the first place? Could it be that it was never meant to be a literal history and instead serves as a kind of folk explanation for that unique speech habit? Or was it just the little people making work for forum posters to correct?

[nooj]

People who make distinción often find it offensive to refer to it as lisping when it isnt and lisping is associated with negative connotations.

It is not lisping. We already have a word in spanish for it. Its called distinción. Why not use it instead.

Personally i dont mind if you dont know the word distinción or you dont know the linguistic background. Thats just ignorance. Ignorance as in not knowing. Nothing wrong with ignorance. Wilful ignorance on the other hand is just annoying, once you are corrected.

[Saim]

Yes, yes. You busted me for not being able to type a theta on my phone. My apologies.

The point is, while you can push a wall of text to "ackshually" people out of calling it a lisp, there's really no purpose in doing so other than to be haughty about it.

What? I have an academic background in linguistics. I talk about linguistics because it's my passion and what I'm dedicating my life to. Is that not welcome in this forum?

Also, my original post had three sentences in it, one of which saying that I largely agreed with the poster I was correcting. You're the one who wrote two paragraphs trying to show that lisping is an accurate description of distinción, and I responded with four paragraphs and an image. Then you responded with a slightly longer post. So what's this "walls of text" business?

So can, I imagine, most people with an actual speech defect inasmuch as it's a speech defect and not a listening one.

I don't know what you mean.

Seseo is indeed certainly a "lisping" of /s/ from Latin.

It's not. Latin /s/ doesn't reliably map to Spanish /θ/ and plenty of other phonemes give /θ/.

Latin captiare /pt/ -
Spanish cazar /θ/; Italian cacciare /tʃ/; Romanian agăța /ts/

Latin puteus /t/ -
Spanish pozo /θ/; Italian pozzo /ts/; Romanian puț /ts/

Latin brachium /k/ -
Spanish brazo /θ/; Italian braccio /tʃ/; Romanian braţ /ts/

Latin coquīna /k/ -
Spanish cocina /θ/; Italian cucina /tʃ/; Romanian cuhnie /h/ (although I suspect this one passed through a Slavic language, it's eerily similar to Serbian kuhinja, Polish kuhnia, Russian кухня and non-Slavic but Slavic-influenced Hungarian konyha).

And I'm not sure what Basque or Arabic have to do with any of this other than to be the source of that "lisping" process.

I mentioned other languages because I like languages and I find it interesting how Basque maintains the same sort of two-way s distinction that Old Castilian had, showing how language contact can create regional features. My mention of Arabic, on the other hand, was just as off-hand as my mention of English and Albanian and was just to show that the phoneme /θ/ isn't lisping, but the phoneme /θ/.

(God forbid I don't type in the exact IPA code here, because being understood is less important than making my posts look like an academic journal article)

That wasn't meant as a slight on your character, but a clarification. Had you said "the th sound" I would've left it, because that's not IPA, but since you used IPA conventions (i.e. the // brackets to represent phonemes) it very much enters into the realm of technical phonological terminology that needs to be kept straight to make sure we're all on the same page.

in English is a sound that goes back to PIE, I think. [...] We kept it and the voiced version. I believe the Icelanders kept it. Not sure who else. (Greek?)

I'm not an expert on PIE but I'm not aware of it being theorised as having /θ/. Greek and Albanian have /θ/ but I'm not sure if either of them are diachronically related to Germanic /θ/.

It didn't come from something else, whatever that something else is.

It probably did. All sounds come from other sounds. Languages are constantly changing through the centuries.

You seem offended

Just to be clear: I'm not. I'm actually enjoying this. Otherwise I wouldn't bother to respond at such length.

those same letters are rendered

I'm going to have to stop you there. In linguistics we don't primarily deal with letters, because languages are not made up of letters. Writing is an artificial, conventional representation of language, not an element of language itself.

You do understand, right, that I was granting that it does in that phrasing.

I suspected you knew it's apocryphal, but I wanted to be sure.

And while you can poke fun at the apocryphal tale of the lisping king,

I didn't, just to be perfectly clear.

Could it be that it was never meant to be a literal history and instead serves as a kind of folk explanation for that unique speech habit?

It very well could do.

Or was it just the little people making work for forum posters to correct?

Since the original poster I corrected liked my comment I'm not sure if it was such a tramautic event for these alleged "little people". It wasn't meant to be some massive intellectual take-down, proving iguanamon's worthlesness, but a simple clarification for anyone who might be interested enough in historical linguistics to care.

[iguanamon]

Since I live in the Caribbean, I am most familiar with Caribbean Spanish. I had no intention to cause such a controversy. I had always heard it referred to in this way in English. I am not a linguist. In future I will not use the word "lisp" to refer to Castillian pronunciation. I will call it the way the Castillians pronounce the "s" sound in front of "i" and "e". I apologize for the offense I have caused. It certainly was not my intent.