Phonetic Variation of the Phoneme /r/ in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish

Abstract

This study reports on the phonetic realizations of the phoneme trilled /r/ in spontaneous speech, in intervocalic and unstressed syllable contexts. The data were collected from native speakers from four distinct provinces within Peruvian regions located in Amazonian territory: namely Maynas (Loreto department); Coronel Portillo (Ucayali department); Leoncio Prado (Huánuco department); and Chanchamayo (Junín department). The investigation pursues two principal goals: to provide a statistical and acoustic characterization of the realizations of the trilled /r/, thereby providing preliminary documentation; and to test Alberto Escobar’s (1978) proposal regarding the internal classification of Peruvian Spanish dialects. Audio segmentation and transcription were performed manually using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2025), while the acoustic and statistical analysis were automated through a script in the same software. Among the results, we registered the following phones: voiceless alveolar trill [r̥], voiced alveolar trill [r], alveolar tap [ɾ], alveolar approximant [ɹ], postalveolar approximant [ɹ], postalveolar approximant preceded by occlusion [ᵈɹ̠], postalveolar approximant with noise [ɹ̠̝], postalveolar approximant with noise preceded by occlusion [ᵈɹ] and voiced alveolar fricative [ɹ̝̝]. The results show that trilled phones are frequent across all groups of amazonian Spanish speakers, while so-called assibilated ones are less common. This supports Escobar’s proposal, while leaving room for further nuance.           Translator           Translator           Translator           Translator           Translator           Translator