Why do Spaniards have a built in lisp whenever they speak Spanish but Latinos don’t?
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I may be wrong but I think it’s really just one dialect spoken in a specific region of Spain that has the lisp. I’m not sure how it developed but it seems that dialect isn’t what was brought over to the Americas.
Its not a lisp but an accent. There is a false rumor that this “lisp” was due to the Spanish King having a speech impediment – but this is not true. As Spanish migrated across the world it evolved and changed. That why it sounds different in different parts of the world.
It is neither a lisp nor an accent.
In Spain, “c” before “e” or “i” is pronounced like “th” in “tooth”. “Z” is also pronounced that way. But in America, they are pronounced “s”.
The reason is debated. Some linguists say that it reflects the pronunciation used in the south of Spain, where many ships left for America. Others think is because it’s easier for non native Spanish speakers, which included all the indigenous peoples as well as immigrants from other countries.
I took a Spanish dialectology seminar my last semester of a Spanish major, so I can answer this very thoroughly. Apologies if it’s too long, I just finally have the opportunity to answer a question I spent enormous energy learning about and stressing over.
First, let me clear one thing up: you, as an English speaker, have two different sounds at the beginning of “sing” and “thing”, right? Now, imagine that, in a different country, they started pronouncing both of these like “sing”. Would you have a lisp if you continued saying “thing” differently from “sing”? No. This is essentially what happened in Spanish. Spanish used to universally have two separate sounds. The /s/ was represented by the letter “s”, and the /θ/ (equivalent to English “th”) was represented by “c” or “z”. Latin America almost universally got rid of the distinction and started pronouncing them both as /s/, but much of Spain retained it. So, in parts of Spain, “casar” is pronounced with /s/, while “cazar” is pronounced with /θ/. I will get into why Latin America got rid of the distinction later.
Spain itself has many dialects. That said, they can very broadly be divided into North and South. Northern dialects, generally speaking, preserve the distinction between /s/ and /θ/. Southern dialects tend to merge them. Sometimes, they both get pronounced as /θ/, but much more commonly, they get pronounced as /s/. This is particularly the case in Andalucía (Andalusia).
That last piece is important because of the role of Andalucía in colonization. For a long time, every single ship that left from Spain left from Sevilla (Seville), which was the most important center of commerce in Spain. The administration of the empire was seated in the North, but the South was where you went to get your assignment and leave for the New World, which is why southerners were disproportionately represented in the colonial process.
During colonization, the settlers formed what’s called a koiné. This is a single language variety that is a mix of the dialects that are spoken by a group of people who end up in close quarters with each other. In order to facilitate communication, they unconsciously speak more similarly to each other, developing linguistic traits that other people have. This koiné got rid of the distinction between /s/ and /θ/ for two reasons: first, like I mentioned, there were a lot of southerners, so their ways of speaking were privileged in the development of the koiné. Second, it’s just easier to have fewer sounds. And because the koiné lacked the distinction, so does the Spanish spoken in virtually all of Latin America. Meanwhile, Northern Spain retains the distinction to this day. They do not lisp, the simply have a “th” sound in addition to the “s”.
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