Introduction

One of the first aspects of the local Spanish to attract my attention when I first went to Guatemala in 1972 was the presence of an inventory of words pronounced with the palatal fricative, [š], a sound presumably lost from standard Spanish in the mid-16th century. Written x in old Spanish, the sound was clearly in use at the time of first European contact because it is reflected in the old spellings of place names such as México. During that time, a large-scale process of sound change had begun, which would affect all the Spanish fricatives, tending to weaken them and moving some of them away from the front of the mouth. Among the consequences of this process, which continues today, was the loss of the old dental affricates (orthographic ç y z) and the widespread loss over time of the distinction [s] and [θ] in words like dos and doce. The old palatal sound, represented orthographically by x, with a pronunciation like English sh in she, migrated to the velar region. It became the velar fricative heard today in the Spanish of Guatemala and elsewhere in words like dijo, whose older pronunciation [dišo] is preserved in ladino, the language of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora. In other varieties, this sound continued to move further back and became the [χ] of central Spain. Obviously, then, the presence of words with the non-standard alveopalatal fricative were of interest, and, in particular, I was curious about their etymologies and distribution. (For details on the fricative shift, consult any modern history of the Spanish language.)

Over several visits to Guatemala in the early 1970s, I kept lists of such words and queried speakers about them. During that period, I was doing research on the Mayan language Q'anjob'al and was living off and on in the town of Santa Eulalia, a Q'anjob'al community in the northwestern department of Huehuetenango. Among the small non-Maya population were the women who provided me with my meals, and over the course of many conversations in Spanish with them I accumulated a group of two dozen or so words that struck me as unusual, both in pronunciation and meaning.

As part of coursework on Spanish lexicography during that same period, I began to search dictionaries for evidence about the words. Most were not included in dictionaries of standard Spanish or evening dictionaries of Americanismos. However, the great Semántica guatemalense, o Diccionario de guatemaltequismos, by Lisandro Sandoval was invaluable for this purpose. From it, I verified many of the words in my own list and collected a set of nearly 130 words altogether that are distinguished by being typically pronounced with the palatal fricative. They are easily identifiable in the Sandoval's dictionary because he writes them with x and helpfully marks them with an asterisk. His introductory notes to the dictionary section for X mention the existence of words with this sound in Mexican and Guatemalan Spanish. He attributes them largely to indigenous influence.

Sandoval describes a pattern of fricative shifting affecting some the words as one travels further and further from the old Spanish center in colonial Guatemala, showing that, in some cases, the x is rendered as ch in nearby Honduras and El Salvador and as j – the standard velar fricative – in Costa Rica. Naturally, I became interested in the distribution of my words in Mexico and the rest of Central America and began to survey as many dictionaries as I could locate. Unfortunately, the Central American varieties of Spanish are still very poorly documented, and there are relatively few resources. There are now five dictionaries of Guatemalan Spanish, but none of them are fully satisfactory, and the 1941 Sandoval remains the most comprehensive. Still, it lacks any indication of regional usage, and includes little etymological information. The other dictionaries have similar limitations, and are even less comprehensive. Comparative examination suggests, however, that many x-words cited by Sandoval have been lost in the speech of the urban variety most thoroughly represented in the more recent dictionaries. Interestingly, though, the post-1970 dictionaries all include new words pronounced with [x], words that were not cited by Sandoval and that appear to be novel coinages or recent borrowings. The existence of a phonological slot for a palatal fricative in modern Guatemalan Spanish seems to invite innovation and new lexical contexts.

An intensive investigation of a small subset of these words (Martin 1997) reveals that they actually have a variety of origins. Some are in fact of indigenous origin, some are apparently archaic retentions, some are recent borrowings from English or other languages, but some are simply impossible to trace. Some words in my original list are still unattested outside my own field notes and require additional systematic field investigation if they are to be properly documented. But some x-words, such as xute and xeca, are so commonplace and identifiable as Guatemalan that they appear in lists of “chapinismos” on tee shirts advertising national identity of the “I ♥ Guatemala ” variety.

Recent informal unpublished fieldwork by colleagues suggests that many of my unattested words, and others containing palatal fricative pronunciations, may be restricted to quite localized regions, such as the Q'anjob'al-speaking region around Santa Eulalia. Moreover, this work also suggests that many do in fact have etymologies traceable to local Mayan languages. Considerable work remains to be done on this topic.

The inventory of [š] -words in Guatemalan Spanish has several unusual characteristics. First, the sound is not uniformly distributed across the language but tends to occur in words that begin with voiceless occlusives such as [k], [p], [t] or with [x] itself. Its frequent occurrence in the combination ix- at the beginning of words may be a marker of indigenous origins, since ix- is a common prefix in languages of Mesoamerica . Semantically, most of the words are adjectives. They often have highly detailed descriptive meanings, often with slightly negative connotations or with implications of small size. A subset of words with [š] consists of nicknames. These distributions suggest a potential sound symbolic element. Another subset of [š] words consists of names of plants and trees native to the region. Most of the members of this latter group are of indigenous origin, usually from Nahuatl.

Some groups of [š] words are of special interest because they seem to represent semantic categories in which the sound is especially prevalent. It is not a surprise that a number of terms related to corn agriculture include the sound since it may be assumed that many of these words were direct and early borrowings that have persisted along with their referents. The same is true for the large number of words, many now being lost, that refer to specific plants, trees, or animals of local origin. A number of [š] words refer to colors, however, which is not so obvious a category. A significant number describe physical conditions, often those that vary from the norm. Examples include words for missing an edge or missing teeth or walking with a limp. There is another area in which careful investigation is warranted.

The persistence of [š] and its distribution suggest strongly that Guatemalan Spanish has an additional phoneme when compared to other dialects of Spanish. This phoneme, most easily represented as /x/, may have some unusual distributional characteristics but they are no more serious than those associated with, for example, the voiced palatal fricative in English. This sound, orthographic s and/or z in words such as measure and azure, shows distributional peculiarities, occurs almost always in loanwords (mostly from French), and is not found in all English varieties. In the case of Guatemalan Spanish, the [š] words show a greater variety of etymological origins than English /ž/, and the sound appears more easily in new loans and neologisms. There are a number of minimal pairs – seca/xeca, chinga/xinga, xuro/churo, etc.

There are even cases where the meaning of two versions of the same word depends on the pronunciation, as in the case of chute ‘spine, stinger' and xute ‘a person who sticks himself in where he is not invited or isn't supposed to be.' Previously, both meanings were pronounced with [š]. The historical validity of the sound, its consistent orthographic representation as x over centuries of literary usage, and its apparent contemporary vitality argue strongly for its reintegration into accounts of Guatemalan Spanish.

Users of this site are invited to contribute further items, additional data and information, proposed etymologies, comparative data, and comments relating to the question of the status of [š]. Send them to the email address identified on the site's main page. Please cite the author's name, the title and the website URL if you use information found here in your own research or manuscripts, and please inform the author when you have done so.

Accessible from this page are two lists. First, there is a list of words recorded in the Sandoval dictionary as having the palatal fricative pronunciation. From that list it is possible to access individual studies that provide the Sandoval definition, along with comparative entries from other Guatemalan and Central American Spanish dictionaries as well as the current edition of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE). Where possible, an etymological account is given. Other information, such as my own field notes and relevant details from other scholarly sources, is included as available. In addition, there is a list of the words pronounced with [š] that are included in dictionaries since 1970, but not in Sandoval. That list also includes my own Huehuetenango words not otherwise documented.

To see the list of Sandoval words with [ š ], click here.

To see the list of words with [ š ] not documented by Sandoval, click here.