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Re: Spanish ll in different dialects

From:Mark Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Friday, August 27, 2004, 22:36
>Does anyone know any other dialects that pronounce ll as j? Or why
this is so? Spanish consonants in general vary more widely than the vowels (rather the opposite of English in that respect), and <ll> may be the most variant. Depending on dialect it is either a palatalized /l/ (/L/?) or a full sequence /lj/; going the other way, it can lose the lateral aspect entirely and gain varying degrees of fricativization, yielding /j/, /Z/, or even /dZ/. This is just the mechanism of langauge change at work. All of those were originally /l:/, hence the spelling, but the sound adapted to its environment in different ways in different regions. -Marcos