Spanish Phonetics

Spanish Vocaloids
The following are a list of Vocaloids that use Spanish.
 * Clara
 * Bruno

Vowels
The system includes the 5 vowels of the Spanish. A difference in comparison to another languages as the English or the Korean, the system doesn't includes diphones for the diphthongs. Instead, the system includes the respecive glides or semivowels of the "weak" vowels ([i] and [u]) which allows to perform the dipthongs when are combined with the corresponding vowels.

Glides
The system includes 4 glides which allows to perform all the dipthongs of the Spanish. The are two types of glides: the non-silibant versions of the phonemes [i] and [u], used for the falling diphthongs (vowel followed by glide); and for the raising diphthongs (glide followed by vowel), the approximant counterparts [j] and [w] (used for [i] and [u] respectively).

Although the vowel and both glides are practically the same, there are subtle difference between them.

Approximant Allophones
Lenition is a kind of sound change that alters the consonants, making them "softer" in some way. Lenition occurs especially often intervocalically (between vowels). In this position, lenition can be seen as a type of assimilation of the consonant to the surrounding vowels, in which features of the consonant that are not present in the surrounding vowels (e.g. obstruction, voicelessness) are gradually eliminated.

In the Spanish, the Lenition has been an important phenomena since the evolution from the Latin, and continues affecting some consonants, particularly the voiced plosives /b/, /d/ and /g/. Those ones in intervowel context are realized as respective "softer" approximants allophones. Although they are approximant (this means they don't produce block of the airflow, like the vowels and glides), the Spanish approximant's sound quality tends to be more stressed, which makes them sound closer to they respective fricative. It for this reason why it isn't weird to be transcribed as that in some text.

Due this, the Spanish Phonetic system includes individual phonemes for the lenited consonants. Those ones are differenced of their standard "stronger" counterparts by the uppercase symbol, fitting in that way with their respective X-SAMPA's symbol for the fricatives.

The "harsher" plosives generally appears at the beginning of the words, after a nasal consonant like [m] or [n], and after a pause, while their "softer" allophones appears in all the other context, especially intervowel.

Like in the case of the English's aspirated allophones, both versions can be interchanged without problem, varying only by the degree of stress and emphasis of the words. The slow speech tends to favor the "hard" plosives while the fast speech tends to favor their "softer" counterparts. .

Rothic Consonants
The Spanish language is one of the few Indo-European languages which has a clear distinction of the rothics consonants /ɾ/ alveolar tap (the "flapped D" in the American English, known as "ere" in the Spanish) and /r/ alveolar trill (Rolling R, known as "erre" in the Spanish). Usually these phonemes are merged or are allophonic in the most of the cases.

The alveolar trill and the alveolar tap are in phonemic contrast word-internally between vowels but are otherwise in complementary distribution. For distinct a intervowel alveolar trill, the double R (or 'rr') notation is used while a single intervowel R always is an alveolar tap. In the Spanish phonetic system, this orthographic notation was used instead the usual X-SAMPA notation, as the the alveolar tap is represented as [r] while the alveolar trill is represented as [rr], not as [4] or [r] how they should be respectively.

Phoneme Replacement
In the Spanish shows a notorious contrast at the beginning of the syllable, however at the end of the syllable (coda position) the contrast of some consonant, making them prone to assimilation processes and/or causing merging. Knowing these ones it's possible replace some of the phonemes for the respective allophone, allowing change the stress and pronunciation