"So Spain doesn't have a lisp?" Distinción 101
So in my last post I mentioned if you're not a native Spanish speaker and/or you don't know how the TH/S sounds work you should refrain from incorporating that into your work (and especially describing Spain's speech pattern as someone with a lisp) as those of us who know will notice. However someone has asked me to explain how diferenciación/distinción works which is what I'll do in this post.
As you may have noticed, or seen in very inaccurate memes, in Spain we pronounce some words with a TH sound. But, is that considered a lisp? Well, no, since a lisp is a speech impediment. That'd be as nonsensical as saying that English speakers have a lisp because they call this (1000) number thousand, or they call the thing that shakes in the sky thunder, or that Greeks have a lisp because they have a bunch of words like thalasso.
What we have is distinción or diferenciación which is a phonemic distinction made between the sounds represented by the letters "s" and "z" (or soft "c" before "e" and "i").
How do you know how to pronounce each sound?
Za, ze, ce, zi, ci, zo, zu = TH
Sa, se, si, so, su = S
(so, no, we don't pronounce sí like "thí", or España like "Ethpaña" as some may have you believe)
This is actually very useful when writing because we know exactly whether we should write a word with a Z or an S depending on how it sounds. Spanish speakers of other dialects may get confused when they learn how to write as children, as they have to memorise if words are written with Z or S. We don't need to do that.
It's also useful when telling apart two words that sound very similar. For example:
"Casa" ("house") is pronounced caSa.
"Caza" ("hunt") is pronounced with caTHa.
Does everyone in Spain speak with distinción / diferenciación?
No! As you can see in the map below, even though most people do the distinción, some people in Spain speak with seseo and some others speak with ceceo.
Seseo consists in pronouncing everything with a S sound. This is the characteristic found in all of the dialects in Latin America, as well as in some parts of the south of Spain and the Canary Islands (not pictured in the map, smh). So for example, they'd pronounce "zapato" ("shoe") as sapato.
Ceceo is the opposite of seseo, so, pronouncing everything with a TH sound. This is also found in the south of Spain. People who do ceceo would typically pronounce a word like "sandía" ("watermelon") as thandía.
So, is ceceo a lisp? Still, no. Most people who speak with ceceo are able to switch to distinción, even if it doesn't come natural to them, so it can't be a speech impediment. In fact, a lot of them are more or less forced to, especially if they move out of the southern regions, as people who speak with ceceo are stereotypically regarded as dumb and unprofessional and are usually the target of classist jokes.
European Spanish (especially the southern/Andalusian dialect) is so diverse when it comes to phonetics and vocabulary, that even within the same city or town you'll find people who pronounce things differently. Which means, not every inhabitant of the part of the map colored as "ceceo" is going to speak with ceceo.
For example, this is the data of three cities in the south, when studying if people do ceceo, seseo or distinción:
I personally spoke with ceceo as a child, as I learned how to talk in a town where people do that, but I was corrected out of it because of concerns regarding the stereotype I just told you. It slips from time to time but I mostly speak with diferenciación now.
Now that I've explained all of this, you probably already know how we'd pronounce the word "distinción", right? It's diStinTHión.
So which accent would Hetalia's Spain have?
Unlike characters like Romano, we don't know which part of the country Spain would be from, so we cannot know which specific dialect he speaks. In the official Spanish dub he does speak with distinción but that's because dubs are usually done in Madrid's accent (which is considered to be the "neutral" one).
If you want to go the safe route, I'd say distinción is the way, since it can be found even in cities where ceceo or seseo predominate. Unless he was from the Canary Island: there's no way he'd speak with other than seseo then.
If you're doing fan work it's very unlikely that you have to use any of these phonetics anyways, since most content is done in English. The point of my explanation is mostly to let you know that:
no, Spaniards don't have a lisp.
there's no such thing as just one "Spanish from Spain" dialect.
mocking people who do the TH sound is actually classist and very uncool.
That's all for today! If you have any questions please let me know :)
