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The Spanish language is written using the Spanish alphabet, which is the ISO Latin script with one additional letter, eñe ñ , for a total of 27 letters. [1] Although the letters k and w are part of the alphabet, they appear only in loanwords such as karate, kilo, waterpolo and wolframio (tungsten or wolfram) and in sensational spellings: okupa, bakalao.
In the 16th century, as the Spanish colonization of the Americas was beginning, the phoneme now represented by the letter j had begun to change its place of articulation from palato-alveolar [ʃ] to palatal [ç] and to velar [x], like German ch in Bach (see History of Spanish and Old Spanish language). In southern Spanish dialects and in those ...
At the start of a syllable, there is a contrast between three nasal consonants: /m/, /n/, and /ɲ/ (as in cama 'bed', cana 'grey hair', caña 'sugar cane'), but at the end of a syllable, this contrast is generally neutralized, as nasals assimilate to the place of articulation of the following consonant [9] —even across a word boundary.
The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is j, and in the Americanist phonetic notation it is y . Because the English name of the letter J, jay, starts with [dʒ] (voiced postalveolar affricate), the approximant is sometimes instead called yod (jod), as in the phonological history terms yod-dropping and yod-coalescence.
The voiced palatal nasal is a type of consonant used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɲ , [1] a lowercase letter n with a leftward-pointing tail protruding from the bottom of the left stem of the letter. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is J.
In old Spanish, the letter "z" was pronounced as [d͡z]. It is thus written in Aljamiado with the letter "zaʾ" (ز). However, in modern Spanish, the pronunciation of the letter "z" has evolved in two manners. In most dialects of European Spanish, the letter "z" today is pronounced identically as the soft pronunciation of the letter "c", as [θ].
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In line with Spanish language's rich consonant fluctuation, other internal variation within varieties of Peninsular Spanish is represented by phenomena such as weakening of coda position -/s/, the defricativization of /tʃ/, realizations of /x/ as [x] and [h] and weakening or change of liquid consonants /l/ and /r/.