About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

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DavyBlack
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About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby DavyBlack » Mon Dec 10, 2018 5:34 pm

Hello guys, My name is David and I'm from Spain (So, sorry if my English is not perfect ;) )
Here's the thing. As a castillian spanish speaker I can't avoid feeling kind of weird when some English speaker states that we have a "lisp". A lisp is a speech impediment, so it is like we were speaking our own language wrong, and that's absurd considering that the language was born here and that is the "standard" way of pronouncing it.
So that's my question, why do you think that we have a lisp?

I'm really curious about your thoughts as English speakers, thank you all for your time.
And regards to all my hispanic mates out there :)
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Re: About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby Speakeasy » Mon Dec 10, 2018 7:48 pm

Hello, DavyBlack, welcome to the forum. What a fascinating topic by which to introduce oneself! In answer to your question, I would note that:

(a) there exists a persistent myth (which has been long-discredited in academic circles) to the effect that the sound /Ө/ in Castilian entered the language as a direct result of Spanish courtiers’ desire to lessen the embarrassment that the King of Spain might have felt owing to his own uncorrected lisp and that this forced imitation of a lisp became progressively adopted by others who wished to emulate the social and political elite of Spain,
(b) many teachers of Spanish throughout North America, of either Anglophone or Latin American heritage, continue to ascribe to the myth of the Castilian lisp and they describe the sound /Ө/ as a lisp both out of ignorance and because it serves a useful means of assisting their students with its approximate pronunciation,
(c) although no specific titles come to mind at the moment, I am pretty sure that I have come across such descriptions in language courses for the self-instruction of Spanish.

So then, although I will likely receive the wrath of more culturally-sensitive members of this forum for saying so, my answer would be “yes”, I hear a lisp because: (a) I have been taught to listen for one, and (b) the description of the sound /Ө/ in Castilian is a reasonably-close approximation for Anglophones.

Given that most North American Anglophone students of Spanish tend to focus on Latin American dialects, I would not be surprised if many others also hear a lisp, for the same reasons.
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Re: About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby Chung » Mon Dec 10, 2018 8:31 pm

DavyBlack wrote:Hello guys, My name is David and I'm from Spain (So, sorry if my English is not perfect ;) )
Here's the thing. As a castillian spanish speaker I can't avoid feeling kind of weird when some English speaker states that we have a "lisp". A lisp is a speech impediment, so it is like we were speaking our own language wrong, and that's absurd considering that the language was born here and that is the "standard" way of pronouncing it.
So that's my question, why do you think that we have a lisp?

I'm really curious about your thoughts as English speakers, thank you all for your time.
And regards to all my hispanic mates out there :)


We speakers of English sometimes think of it as a lisp also because the sounds that we associate when seeing 'c' before front vowels or 'z' are never pronounced as 'th'. In a certain way, this extends to conventions or perceptions found in other speech communities, and 'th' /θ/ itself not even being a common phoneme in phonological inventories when surveying languages (per WALS). For my part, I have reliably encountered these sounds only in English (and even then it's restricted to the cluster 'th'), Northern Saami (đ and ŧ), Bashkir (ҙ and ç), and Turkmen (z and s). Bashkir, and Turkmen, in particular, are a little bit like Castillan Spanish in that their spelling conventions go against the widespread convention whereby the sounds /s/ and /z/ are linked to the symbols c/s and з/z; ҫ/s and ҙ/z are to be pronounced like 'th' in 'thin' and 'th' in 'these' respectively. I suspect strongly that pronouncing 's' ('c' in Cyrillic) and 'z' ('з' in Cyrillic) in Bulgarian, French, Romanian, Polish or Turkish among many others as /θ/ (as in 'thin') and /ð/ (as in 'these') respectively would also elicit weird reactions from native speakers of those languages. I'm not sure though if they think of such (mis)pronunciations like English-speakers do when the latter sometimes label these realizations as lisping.

Non-technical judgement (and negative connotation of lisping) aside, it's ultimately a sound change that by accident of history took hold in a dialect that formed the basis of one standard language. We just have to live with it. For me, it's rather like how some people in the Germanic-speaking world started to pronounce 'p' as '(p)f(f)' such that modern standard German Affe and Pfund are the respective cognates of English 'ape' and 'pound'. Maybe it would weaken slightly the external perception of lisping if RAE were to change Spanish orthography to something as in Northern Saami (!) where'd you have to use đ and ŧ too (e.g. *Ŧaragoŧa instead of Zaragoza, *ŧinco instead of cinco), but that's probably a non-starter for a lot of Hispanophones (and learners of the language).
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Re: About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby Querneus » Mon Dec 10, 2018 8:50 pm

DavyBlack wrote:Hello guys, My name is David and I'm from Spain (So, sorry if my English is not perfect ;) )
Here's the thing. As a castillian spanish speaker I can't avoid feeling kind of weird when some English speaker states that we have a "lisp". A lisp is a speech impediment, so it is like we were speaking our own language wrong, and that's absurd considering that the language was born here and that is the "standard" way of pronouncing it.
So that's my question, why do you think that we have a lisp?

Just as Speakeasy says, it's a myth, a cuento or creencia if you will, that there was once upon a time a king in Spain that had a lisp and that people in Spain imitated him as a result. This myth is not known in Latin America for what it's worth (people tend to regard the z/ce/ci sound in Spain as just a regional accent thing), but it is widely repeated in English-speaking countries (including by Latin American teachers, again, as Speakeasy says).
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Re: About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby Serpent » Tue Dec 11, 2018 2:12 am

I never heard that myth but I can say that when you're used to variants with no such distinction, Castillian Spanish does sound like lisping :lol:
I think it's actually common in any language to feel like a new variant is a mispronunciation of a familiar one - with lisp the main difference is that the phenomenon already has a name and exists in various languages.

To me it's not so different from how my mum says, "oh, this language sounds similar to Polish, that must be Portuguese then" 8-)
Chung wrote: I suspect strongly that pronouncing 's' ('c' in Cyrillic) and 'z' ('з' in Cyrillic) in Bulgarian, French, Romanian, Polish or Turkish among many others as /θ/ (as in 'thin') and /ð/ (as in 'these') respectively would also elicit weird reactions from native speakers of those languages. I'm not sure though if they think of such (mis)pronunciations like English-speakers do when the latter sometimes label these realizations as lisping.
Wow, I have no idea (about Russian, for example). It just sounds really weird, perhaps more like a foreign accent? However it definitely sounds like lisping if Finnish native speakers pronounce sh as s :lol:
Another stereotypical kind of lisp is pronouncing s/sh as f, but I think it really mostly happens with kids.
(edit - the latter can also be used by adults jokingly, for example i may call my friend Maria Mafka (Mashka). i think it originated as parodying mommyspeak and/or so called "glamorous chicks". ugh never thought of that)
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Re: About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby Jaleel10 » Tue Dec 11, 2018 6:01 am

I speak Castilian Spanish and very often Americans will make fun of my accent :(
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Re: About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby Chmury » Tue Dec 11, 2018 6:55 am

Castilian Spanish is awesome! I chose to learn the Spanish from there precisely because of those 'c' and 'z' sounds pronounced as 'th' in English (obviously not entirely for that reason, but the foreignness of the sounds in the Spanish from Spain in comparison to those of Latin America and my own native English, really attracted me to it). And no you don't have a lisp, as the others before me have already explained and given reasons for why certain English speakers consider it one. I feel that people who consider it a lisp simply haven't really taken a moment to think about it or realise that each language has its own system and conventions of spelling and pronunciation. Which is something we all learn when we start learning our first foreign language.

In regards to Jaleel10's experience, I was listening to an episode of Joe Rogan's podcast a month or two ago with Steven Kotler where they were discussing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on the experience of flow (highly recommend his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience) and Joe basically made fun of his name for what seemed a few solid minutes, interrupted the flow of the interview, and said something along the lines of that's just ridiculous and what were his parents thinking. Clearly he's looking at Mihaly's name from the perspective of a linguistically ignorant monolingual American who grew up in a time where foreign languages played a very insignificant role if any in education and general societal awareness. So due to the general lack of importance of foreign languages in America's education system and society in the past (at least for monolingual English speakers, and I also don't know what it's like now over there, though I imagine things are improving), that might help shed some light on the reaction Jaleel is getting and why they think Spaniards have a lisp.
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Re: About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby DavyBlack » Tue Dec 11, 2018 7:04 am

I once read about that myth, yes, and it's really funny to think about an entire country changing their pronunciation because of a king :lol:
I guess that "non-spaniard" people's ears are more used to the Latin American varieties of spanish, so this is one of the reasons why you think our pronunciation of the aforecited phoneme is weird or strange, but, does this happen only because of the contraposition of LA and Spain varieties? Or does it stand on its own to foreign ears?
If the second option is true, people should think the same about other languages that frecuently use this sound, like greek or icelandic (especially greek, which pronunciation is very similar to the castillian spanish).

In addition to this, I should say that there are some regions in southern Spain where people have what we call "seseo", a word that I think that doesn't really exist in English, and it refers to a feature in which the speaker pronounce the <c> and <z> before <e> or <i> just like they do in Latin American accents. I've been told that the spanish conquerors who sailed to South and Central America where mostly from these regions of Spain, and that's the reason why they have that feature too.
In fact, we also have an equivalent word for "lisp" which is "ceceo" (θeθeo). So, if you think that the standard spaniard has a lisp, just imagine one with this impediment :lol: .
If you are curious about it, you can watch any Stranger Things episode with castillian spanish dubbing and hear Dustin speaking. I guess you'll clearly hear the diference between the rest of the characters and him. That's a lisp for us.
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Re: About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby Saim » Tue Dec 11, 2018 9:07 am

Ceceo isn't an impediment, it's a natural part of some Andalusian accents.
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Re: About the "lisp" in castillian spanish

Postby Speakeasy » Tue Dec 11, 2018 11:25 am

DavyBlack wrote:I once read about that myth, yes, and it's really funny to think about an entire country changing their pronunciation because of a king …
The idea that an entire people might adopt a speech habit of a sovereign (or that of a small but prestigious and influential class of social, economic, and political elites) is not just plausible, it is quite common throughout history; the process results in “received pronunciation.”

The reason why the myth of the origins of the Castilian lisp is so enduring is that, as for many foundational stories, it offers an entertaining explanation to something which might be otherwise inexplicable. Recent (serious) studies of the demonstrably-false information which pollutes the non-traditional media suggest that lies, half-truths, distortions, and “alternate facts” circulate more quickly and more widely than do provable facts or corrections simply because they are more engaging than the latter. ;)
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