Seseo and ceceo: how s and z merged
El seseo y el ceceo
c. 1450–1650. Medieval Castilian had several hissing sounds, written ç/z and ss/s, which it slowly reduced.
What happened
Medieval Castilian had several hissing sounds, written ç/z and ss/s, which it slowly reduced. In the centre and north of Spain two sounds survived, so casa and caza are different words: s and the th-like sound spelled z or c (before e, i). In Seville, between the mid-15th century and the first decades of the 16th, the sounds collapsed into one. When the single sound is an s this is seseo; when it is the th-like sound it is ceceo. Around 1540 Arias Montano claimed hardly an educated man in Seville could tell the letters apart (probably an exaggeration). Seseo became the prestige urban pronunciation of Seville, ceceo was linked early on to the countryside, the coast and the lower classes. Seville was the port for the Indies, and seseo is today the norm in the Canary Islands and all of Spanish America.
Read about it
Connected
- Columbus reaches America (12 October 1492)
- Yeísmo: when ll became y (c. 1500–)
Sources
- Historia de la pronunciación (El español hablado en Andalucía) — Grupo EHA, Universidad de Sevilla
- Rafael Lapesa y el 'andalucismo' del español de América (H. López Morales, Philologia Hispalensis 12) — Universidad de Sevilla
- El yeísmo en América durante el siglo XVI (Claudia Parodi, Anuario de Letras) — UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas