Yeísmo (Spanish pronunciation: [ʝeˈizmo]) is a distinctive feature of many dialects of the Spanish language, which consists of the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme /ʎ/ (written ‹ll›) and its merger into the phoneme /ʝ/ (written ‹y›), usually realized as a palatal fricative or affricate. In other words, ‹ll› and ‹y› represent the same sound /ʝ/. The term yeísmo comes from the Spanish name of the letter ‹y› (ye[1]). The opposite term lleísmo (pronounced: [ʎeˈizmo]), which is attested sparingly in some fewer subvarieties, refers to the merger of /ʝ/ (spelled "y") into /ʎ/ (spelled "ll").[2]
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Most dialects currently realize the merged phoneme as a voiced palatal fricative [ʝ], which becomes an affricate or a plosive (either a voiced postalveolar affricate [dʒ] as in English gin or a voiced palatal affricate [ɟ͡ʝ]) or a voiced palatal stop when it occurs after a pause (as at the beginning of a sentence) or after a nasal (as in the words cónyuge and conllevar). In other dialects, such as Rioplatense, it may be realized as a postalveolar ([ʒ] or [ʃ])
Yeísmo has always been common in most of Latin America (except highlands), and nowadays it's also common in most of Spain. The distinction is more common in areas where bilingualism with indigenous languages such as Catalan and Basque is common.
At present, the distinction between y and ll remains in Colombia in a zone around Bogotá and Popayán, the southern Ecuadoran highlands, Andean and south coastal Peru, most of Bolivia, San Juan and La Rioja provinces in Argentina, as well as the regions bordering Paraguay, and in isolated pockets in the south of Chile. The distinction is more common in areas where bilingualism with indigenous languages such as Aymara and Guaraní is common.[3] In Spain, rural areas in the northern part of the country and much of the south except Andalusia used to retain the distinction, while urban areas have had yeísmo much longer, but the distinction is now lost in most of Spain (see map 1 and map 2).
Yeísmo produces homophony in a number of cases. For example, the following word pairs sound the same to speakers of dialects with yeísmo, but would be minimal pairs in regions that distinguish:
Due to the relatively low frequency of both ‹y› and ‹ll›, confusion is unlikely. However, orthographic mistakes are common (for example, writing llendo instead of yendo — for some reason, most people tend to err towards ‹ll›)). A similar effect took place in the local name of the island of Majorca: Mallorca is a continental Catalan hypercorrection of the earlier Maiorca.[4]
Pharies, David (2007). A Brief History of the Spanish Language. University of Chicago Press. pp. 76, 144, 197, 200, 213. ISBN 9780226666839.
Torreblanca, Máximo (1974), "Estado actual del lleísmo y de la h aspirada en el noroeste de la provincia de Toledo", Revista de dialectología y tradiciones populares 30 (1-2): 77–90