When an 'll' is pronounced like an 'i' (and it's not a mistake)

PalmaWhy do we say ‘abe[j]a’ and ‘ore[j]a’ if we write ‘abella’ and ‘orella’? The most intuitive answer would be to say that, in some dialects, ‘ll’ is pronounced like an ‘i’ (which, in this article, we will represent with [j]). The explanation seems convincing, but it collapses as soon as we look into it a little.

If the rule were simply to substitute ‘ll’ with an ‘i’, we would also have to say ‘[j]una’ instead of ‘lluna’ and ‘cava[j]’ instead of ‘cavall’. However, this is not what has traditionally happened. It is true that today there are speakers who make these pronunciations, but they respond to a different phenomenon. Behind an ‘abe[j]a’ and a ‘[j]una’ there isn’t the same story. To understand it, we must stop looking, for a moment, at spelling. Writing can make us think that all ‘ll’s are the same, but the history of words explains something else.

Consonant clusters

Not all the words we write today with ‘ll’ have the same origin. Orthography groups them under the same spelling because in a large part of the linguistic domain they are pronounced the same, but historically they come from different consonant groups. On the one hand, the Latin groups –C’L–, –G’L–, and –LJ– evolved towards a ‘iod’ (the sound we represent with [j]) in one part of the linguistic domain, while in the rest they gave rise to the palatal lateral (ll). On the other hand, the initial L- and the geminated LL of Latin evolved towards the palatal lateral throughout the domain.

All this seems complicated until we exemplify it. The words ‘po[j]’ and ‘poll’ are both written with ‘ll’, but they do not share the same history. ‘Po[j]’, which is the name for the head parasite, comes from the Latin peduculu and is part of the group of words that underwent iodization. ‘Poll’, on the other hand, which denotes the chick, continues the Latin pullu and retained the palatal lateral.

This also explains why iodization only affects a certain set of words. It is not a rule that transforms all ‘ll’s, but rather the consequence of a very specific phonetic change. Thus, words like ‘abe[j]a’, ‘ore[j]a’, ‘ta[j]ar’, and ‘pa[j]a’ share the same behavior, while ‘lluna’, ‘llengua’, and ‘cavall’ follow a different path. Iodization, ultimately, does not depend on how we write words, but on the consonant group from which they originate.

This phenomenon is a good example of the not always evident relationship between spelling and spoken language. We often tend to think that we write words as they are pronounced, when the opposite is more common: writing fixes a common form for all speakers, while pronunciation continues to retain differences that have been shaped over centuries.

It is also here that a quite common confusion arises. When a speaker says ‘abe[j]a’, they are not doing the same as someone who says ‘[j]una’. The first case is the result of a phonetic change that occurred during the formation of Catalan and which only affects certain words. The second corresponds to ieism, a much more recent phenomenon that consists of pronouncing any ‘ll’ as an ‘i’, without taking into account the origin of the word. The result is similar to the ear, but the two processes have completely different histories and causes.

Here, there is another idea that should be dispelled. The iodization is often presented as an exclusively Balearic feature. Today it is true that it is in the Balearic Islands that the phenomenon is preserved with more vitality, but this does not mean that it has always been so. For centuries it was also part of an extensive area of Central Catalan, even though today it has disappeared from a large part of these territories.

This decline did not happen overnight. Like all linguistic changes, it was gradual, with periods of coexistence between the two pronunciations. Linguists agree that phonetics alone is not enough to explain it, but that social factors also intervened. In this sense, the growing prestige of the Barcelona pronunciation, especially from the 19th century onwards, ended up turning the palatal lateral (that is, the 'll') into the reference model for a large part of the linguistic domain. Progressively, many iodized forms became associated with rural speech or varieties considered less prestigious, and this favored their decline.

Iodization

The Balearic Islands, however, followed a different evolution. The relative insular isolation and much lower pressure from continental linguistic models probably favoured the preservation of the traditional distinction between the palatal lateral and the 'iod'. Unlike what happened in Central Catalan, therefore, 'iodization' did not acquire negative social connotations and continued to be transmitted from generation to generation.

The Grammar of the Catalan Language of the IEC records this reality and clearly differentiates 'iodization' from 'yeísmo'. When describing Balearic speakers, it presents 'iodization' as a characteristic trait of these varieties (and also of some northeastern speakers), although in formal registers it considers pronunciation with a palatal lateral preferable. This does not make 'iodization' an incorrect pronunciation: it simply reflects the coexistence between a common norm and a very much alive dialectal diversity.

'Iodization', therefore, shows to what extent the same spelling can hide very different histories. We all write 'abella' and 'orella', but not all of us pronounce them the same. This difference is the result, once again, of an evolution that did not follow exactly the same path in all territories or in all words. And it is precisely this history, invisible in the spelling but still alive in speech, that explains why, sometimes, an 'll' is pronounced like an 'i' without it being any error.