Unstressed Vowel Reduction in Bogotá Spanish

Abstract

Vowel devoicing is a well-documented feature of American Spanish. This phenomenon (sometimes referred to as unstressed vowel reduction) occurs preceding and following obstruents, especially in a sibilant /s/ environment. This study presents a description of vowel devoicing in Bogotá Spanish and investigates the role of potential factors, including linguistic, sociolinguistic, and stylistic variables. The results show that speakers pronounced vowels as partially devoiced, completely devoiced, or apparently elided. In addition, the analysis revealed that stress, consonantal context, and utterance position are factors strongly related to vowel devoicing. These findings suggest that phonetic reduction studies shed new light on the pronunciation of American Spanish and enhance our understanding of the phonological development of Spanish language.