
right|280px|thumb|Regions with the merger () in blue, regions with distinction in pink, mixed regions in purple|class=skin-invert-image right|220px|thumb|Regions with the merger () in blue, regions with distinction in pink, mixed regions in purple|class=skin-invert-image '''''' (; literally "Y-ism") is a distinctive feature of many dialects of the Spanish language, characterized by the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme (written ) and its merger into the voiced palatal fricative phoneme (written ). It is an example of delateralization.
right|280px|thumb|Regions with the merger () in blue, regions with distinction in pink, mixed regions in purple|class=skin-invert-image right|220px|thumb|Regions with the merger () in blue, regions with distinction in pink, mixed regions in purple|class=skin-invert-image ' (; literally "Y-ism") is a distinctive feature of many dialects of the Spanish language, characterized by the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme (written ) and its merger into the voiced palatal fricative phoneme (written ). It is an example of delateralization.
In other words, and represent the same sound, , when is present. The term comes from one of the Spanish names for the letter (). Over 90% of Spanish speakers exhibit this phonemic merger. Similar mergers exist in other languages, such as French, Italian, Hungarian, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese or Galician, with different social considerations.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).