Say it right

Question

I know there are a lot of questions out there about the spanish 'lisp' and that people don't like it to be called this because it's an accent, most of the time they don't actually have a lisp. But I was wondering, since it's incorrect to call it lisping, what should it be called? Is there a word for it?

*an accent - Yeser007, Oct 1, 2010

oops :) - spanish-at-heart, Oct 2, 2010

Answer 1

Having an accent which distinguishes between the 'S,' soft 'C,' and 'Z' by pronouncing the latter two in a way that sounds roughly like 'th' to English speakers is called having distinción. Seseo is the word for what most Latin American Spanish-speakers do, where the S, soft C, and Z are all pronounced kind of like S. Ceceo is the less common phenomenon of making them all a 'th' sound. Apparently it happens in parts of Andalucía.

Source: Wikipedia (paragon of reliability, I know...)

Ha! I just got back from the same article. I knew seseo and ceceo, but I had forgotten the phrase for distinción. - KevinB, Oct 1, 2010

Answer 2

I live in Miami and I've heard people talk about some myth, saying there was a king that had a lisp so he made everyone else talk like that. But that's nonsense. If someone had a lisp, they would pronounce everything that's supposed to have an S sound as TH. The Castilian accent differentiates C's and Z's from S's. Here's an article that talks more about it:

http://spanish.about.com/b/2003/11/20/from-the-mailbox-the-myth-of-the-castilian-lisp.htm