User:Sarahwhitelaw/Cuban Spanish

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alfaraz, Gabriela G. "The lateral variant of (r) in Cuban Spanish." Selected proceedings of the

''4th workshop on Spanish sociolinguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings''

Project. 2008.

Guitart, Jorge .M. (1980). Aspectos del consonantismo habanero: Reexamen descriptivo. In G.E.

Scavnicky (ed.), Dialectología hispanoamericana: Estudios actuales. Washington, DC:

Georgetown University Press. 32-47

López Morales, Humberto. (1970). Estudios sobre el español de Cuba. New York: Las Américas.

Schwegler, Armin, et al. Fonética Y Fonología Españolas, 4th Edition. Wiley, 2010.

Terrell, Tracy D. “Final /s/ in Cuban Spanish.” Hispania, vol. 62, no. 4, 1979, pp. 599–612.

JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/340142. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.

Terrell, Tracy D. "Constraints on the aspiration and deletion of final/s/in Cuban and Puerto Rican

Spanish." Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe 4.1/2 (1977): 35-51

Terrell, Tracy D. (1976). Variación fonética de /r/ y /rr/ en el español cubano. Revista de

Filología Española LVIII(1-4): 109-132

Article body
'''Cuban Spanish is marked by a variety of phonological features that make it similar to, and distinct from many other dialects of Spanish. Like other Latin American Spanish varieties, this dialect is seseante, meaning there is no distinction between ⟨s⟩, ⟨z⟩, and soft ⟨c⟩ sounds, differing from a Peninsular Spanish dialect. Cuban Spanish is also similar to most other Latin American dialects by using yeísmo. The letters ⟨y⟩ and ⟨ll⟩ are pronounced [ʝ].'''

Similar to speakers of other Caribbean dialects, Cuban Spanish speakers exhibit weak pronunciation of consonants, especially at the end of a syllable. A syllable-final /s/ may either be aspirated and pronounced as [h] or may even be deleted. Where some speakers would pronounce a word like estar ('to be') as /estaɾ/, pronouncing the /s/ phoneme, many Caribbean Spanish speakers will aspirate the /s/ and produce /eʰtaɾ/ . In some cases, the /s/ will disappear entirely in a process known as elision. In this case, /estaɾ/ would be pronounced /e taɾ/.

Take for example, the following sentence:

Esos perros no tienen dueños (Eso' perro' no tienen dueño')

[ˈesoh ˈperoh no ˈtjeneŋ ˈdweɲoh]

('Those dogs do not have owners')

Also, because /s/ may also be deleted in the syllable coda and because this feature has variable realizations, any or all instances of [h] in the above example may be dropped, potentially rendering [ˈeso ˈpero no ˈtjeneŋ ˈdweɲo]. Other examples: disfrutar ("to enjoy") is pronounced [dihfɾuˈtaɾ], and fresco ("fresh") becomes [ˈfɾehko]. In Havana, después ("after[ward]") is typically pronounced [dehˈpwe] (de'pué'/despué').

Another instance of consonant weakening ("lenition") in Cuban Spanish (as in many other dialects) is the deletion of intervocalic /d/ in the participle ending -ado (-ao/-a'o), as in cansado (cansao/cansa'o) [kanˈsao] "tired"). More typical of Cuba and the Caribbean is the elision of final /r/ in some verb infinitives, or merger with -/l/; e.g. parar, 'to stop', can be realized as [paˈɾal] or [paˈɾa] (paral/pará).

The voiceless velar fricative [x] (spelled as ⟨g⟩ before ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ and ⟨j⟩) is usually aspirated or pronounced [ h], common in Andalusian and Canarian dialects and some Latin American dialects.

Another common characteristic of Caribbean Spanish is the tendency for other processes to affect consonants in the final position such as [n] velarization and neutralization  of liquid consonants.  Word-final /n/ becomes [ŋ]; syllable-final /r/ may become [l] or [j], or even become entirely silent. Final /r/ more frequently becomes /l/ in the eastern and central regions of Cuba. For example, in words such as carne (“meat”) or amor (“love”) many speakers of this dialect will produce the words as [kalne] or [amol] .  Postvocalic [ð] tends to disappear entirely. All of these characteristics occur to one degree or another in other Caribbean varieties, as well as in many dialects in Andalusia in southern Spain—the place of historical origin of these characteristics.

'''A final common feature of Caribbean Spanish is velarization where the typically pronounced [n] phoneme at the end of the syllable is produced [ŋ]. In Cuban Spanish, it may be pronounced before a vowel or before a pause such as in the words inevitable (“inevitable”) or hablan (“they talk”) pronounced as  [iŋ e βi ta βle] and [a βlaŋ #] .'''

In some areas of Cuba, the voiceless affricate [ tʃ] (spelled ⟨ch⟩) is deaffricated to [ ʃ].

The Spanish of the eastern provinces (the five provinces comprising what was formerly Oriente Province) is closer to that of the Dominican Republic than to the Spanish spoken in Havana.

'There also exists a phonological feature unique to Cuba called the toque or golpe'' (“tap” or “hit”). This phonological process occurs within a consonant cluster that is composed of a liquid consonant, i.e., [ɾ] or [l], and an occlusive or nasal consonant, i.e., [p][t][g][b][t][k][n][m]. Instead of producing the liquid, a Cuban speaker may produce the glottal stop consonant [ʔ] . For example, a word like algodón ('cotton') will have the [l] phoneme substituted for the [ʔ] sound, producing [aʔ-go-ˈðon].'''

In western Cuba /l/ and /ɾ/ in a syllable coda can be merged with each other and assimilated to the following consonant, resulting in geminates. At the same time, the non-assimilated and unmerged pronunciations are more common. Example pronunciations, according to the analysis of Arias (2019) which transcribes the merged, underlying phoneme as /d/: