The sibilants in Zas: analysis of a change in process

Abstract

The nature of the sibilant systems of Galician has always attracted the attention of linguists due to their profound instability and descriptive elusiveness. The present article seeks to analyze, from an acoustic-phonetics perspective, the sibilant system of four women born in Zas (Galicia, A Coruña) who belong to two different age groups. This analysis has revealed that the older women display a one-sibilant system, with apical-alveolar realization. On the contrary, younger women show a previously undescribed system integrated by two units —a fricative interdental voiceless /θ/ and an apical-alveolar sibilant /s̺/— in which the non-palatalization of /ʃ/ is kept in spite of the lack of seseo characteristic of this particular variant.