*** Welcome to piglix ***

Bolivian Spanish


The Spanish (or Castilian) language is spoken in Bolivia by most of the population, either as a mother tongue or as a second language. Within the Spanish of Bolivia there are different regional varieties. In the border areas, Bolivia shares dialectal features with the neighboring countries.

Throughout Bolivia the preservation of phonemic contrast between /ʝ/ and the lateral /ʎ/ (i.e. the absence of yeísmo) is the norm.Aspiration of syllable-final /s/ is frequent in the lowlands, while in the highlands the sibilant /s/ tends to be preserved, realized either as a laminal or, frequently, an apical [s]. In highland dialects, the "trill" phoneme (orthographic <rr> or word-initial <r>) is often assibilated, realized as a voiced apicoalveolar fricative. In highland Bolivian Spanish there is "intense reduction" of unstressed vowels in contact with /s/, often resulting in syllables with /s/ as their nucleus, e.g. pues ("well,...") pronounced [ps].

This variety of Spanish is spoken on the Chaco-Beni plain and in the Santa Cruz valleys, a region that includes the departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, and Pando. Spanish is spoken by almost the entire population of these regions, and—like Spanish throughout the Americas—has its basis in Andalusian Spanish, but with influences of native languages such as Chiquitano, Chané and Guarani, as well as Old World languages including Portuguese and Arabic. And although it is fairly uniform across regions and social classes, there are subtle geographical differences.


...
Wikipedia

...