Andalusian Spanish

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The Andalusian dialects of Spanish (Spanish: andaluz, pronounced [andaˈluθ], locally [andaˈluh, ændæˈlʊ]) are spoken in Andalusia, Ceuta, Melilla, and Gibraltar. They include perhaps the most distinct of the southern variants of peninsular Spanish, differing in many respects from northern varieties in a number of phonological, morphological and lexical features. Many of these are innovations which, spreading from Andalusia, failed to reach the higher strata of Toledo and Madrid speech and become part of the Peninsular norm of standard Spanish.^[3] Andalusian Spanish has historically been stigmatized at a national level, though this appears to have changed in recent decades, and there is evidence that the speech of Seville or the norma sevillana enjoys high prestige within Western Andalusia.^[4][5]

Due to the large population of Andalusia, Andalusian dialects are among the most widely spoken dialects in Spain. Within the Iberian Peninsula, other southern varieties of Spanish share some core elements of Andalusian, mainly in terms of phonetics  – notably Extremaduran Spanish and Murcian Spanish as well as, to a lesser degree, Manchegan Spanish.

Due to massive emigration from Andalusia to the Spanish colonies in the Americas and elsewhere, all Latin American Spanish dialects share some fundamental characteristics with Western Andalusian Spanish, such as the use of ustedes instead of vosotros for the second person informal plural, seseo, and a lack of leísmo. Much of Latin American Spanish shares some other Andalusian characteristics too, such as yeísmo, weakening of syllable-final /s/, pronunciation of historical /x/ or the ⟨j⟩ sound as a glottal fricative, and merging syllable-final /r/ and /l/.^[6] Canarian Spanish is also strongly similar to Western Andalusian Spanish due to its settlement history.^[7]