Peruvian Spanish has been spoken in Peru since 1532. There are four varieties spoken in the country, by about 80% of the population.
The Spanish language first arrived in what today is Peru in 1532. During colonial and early republican times, the Spanish spoken colloquially in the coast and in the cities of the highland possessed strong local features, but as a result of dialect leveling in favor of the standard language, the language of urban Peruvians today is more or less uniform in pronunciation throughout most of the country. Vestiges of the older dialect of the coast can be found in the speech of black Peruvians, which retains Andalusian features such as the aspiration or deletion of final /s/ and the deletion of final /r/. The dialect of Arequipa in its pure form is now extinct, although some elders are familiar with it.
Throughout most of the highland, Quechua continued to be the language of the majority until the mid 20th century.  Mass migration (rural exodus) into Lima starting in the 1940s, and into other major cities and regional capitals later on, accompanied by discrimination and the growth of mass media, have reconfigured the linguistic demography of the country in favor of Spanish. The poor urban masses originating in this migration adopted the standardized dialect spoken in the cities, however with traces of Andean pronunciation and a simplified syntax.
The phonology of Andean Peruvian Spanish is distinguished by its slow time and unique rhythm (grave accent), assibilation of /r/ and /ɾ/, and an apparent confusion of the vowels /e/ with /i/ and /o/ with /u/. (In reality, they are producing a sound between /e/ and /i/, and between /o/ and /u/.) Furthermore, the "s" (originally apical and without aspiration) is produced with more force than that of the coast; this is also generally true of the other consonants, at the loss of the vowels. Other distinctive features are the preservation of /ʎ/, sometimes hypercorrective realization of /ʝ/ as [ʎ], and the realization of velar plosives as a fricative [x].
The morphosyntactic characteristics are typical:
- Confusion or unification of gender and number
- A ellas lo recibí bien.. La revista es caro.
- Confusion or unification of gender and number
- esa es su trenza del carlos.
- Overuse of the diminutives –ito e –ita
- Vente aquicito.. Sí, señorita, ahí están sus hijos.
- Lo echan la agua. Lo pintan la casa
- Duplication of the possessives and objects
- Su casa de Pepe.. Lo conozco a ella.
- The absence or redundant use of articles
- Plaza de Armas es acá. La María está loca.
- Uncommon use of the preposition "en" in front of locative adverbs
- Todo caerá en su encima
- The use of "no más" and "pues" after the verb
- Dile nomás pues.
- The use of the verb at the end of the phrase
- Está enojada dice.
- The use of the simple tense to express the preterite and of the indicative in place of the subjunctive in subordinates.
Peruvian coast Spanish
Coastal Spanish is spoken throughout the coast. It has the reputation (in pronunciation) of being one of the "purest" dialects in all of coastal Latin America because it does not debuccalize /s/ between vowels[is "in syllable coda" what is meant?] and retains the fricatives [x] and [χ]. It is the characteristic dialect as perceived abroad and has the reputation of being the base of "normal" or standard Peruvian Spanish.
- The vowels are stable and clear.
- /r/ and /ɾ/ are pronounced clearly, without any fricativization.
- /s/ is more often laminal than apical, and debuccalized to [h] in front of most consonants (though it is [x] before /k/). It is retained as [s] in final position (as opposed to in Chile or Andalucia).
- /x/ varies between [x] and [χ]; it is never [h].
- Word-final nasals are velar (not alveolar like in Mexico or central Spain).
- The final /d/ is normally elided, but sometimes devoiced as [t] in formal speech.
- Yeísmo exists, the phoneme occurring as [ʝ] and [j] interchangeably, and as palato-alveolar [dʒ] in initial position by some speakers.
- The tendency to eliminate hiatus in word with an -ear suffix.
General Spanish phrases from the Americas are common but there are also phrases that originate in the Lima coastal area, such as frequent traditional terms and expressions; the most ingrained "quechuaism" in common speech is the familiar calato, meaning "naked".
Andean-Costal Spanish or neolimeño
Born in the most recent 30–50 years with a mixture of the speech of Andean migrants and the speech of Lima. This dialect is the speech that is most typical of Peru.
|Characteristics||Example||Coastal/Lima Spanish||Neolimeño Spanish|
|No assibilation of /r/ and /ɾ/ except in the older generations, but the articulation of these two sounds is weakened, and the final syllable is silent[clarification needed] in internal contexts.|
|Closed and lax emission of vowels in general.[clarification needed]|
|Confusion between /e/ and /i/ as well as /o/ and /u/ in casual speech.|
|Weakening, sometimes to the point of elimination, of the consonant sounds /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ and /ʝ/ when in intervocalic contexts.||aguanta||[a'gwaŋ.ta]||[a'waŋ.ta]|
|Strong pronunciation of "s", or with a weak whistling;[clarification needed] less aspiration before consonants (articulated more like Spanish /x/ in front of /k/)||asco||[ah'ko]||[ax'ko]|
|Voicing of voiceless consonants.||pasajes||[pa'sa.xes]||[pa'sa.ɣes]|
|Accelerated speech and with varied intonation based on Andean Spanish.|
This dialect has the usual Andean syntactics, like lack of agreement in gender and number, the frequent use of diminutives or augmentatives, loísmo, double possessives and ending phrases with "pues", "pe" or "pue".
As far as the lexicon is concerned, there are numerous neologisms, influences from Quechua, and slang among the youth often heard in the streets.
This dialect has developed uniquely, with contact from Andean Spanish and the Spanish of Lima with the Amazonian languages. It has a distinctive tonal structure.
Phonetically it is characterized by:
- The sibilant /s/ resisting aspiration
- A confusion of /x/ with /f/ (always bilabial)
- For example, San Juan becomes San Fan
- There is occlusion of the intervals /b, d, g/ in tonal ascension with aspiration and lengthening of the vowels.
- /p, t, k/ are pronounced with aspiration
- The /ʝ/ tends to become an affricate (as opposed to Coastal Peruvian Spanish)
- Also, there is assibilation and weak trills.
On the other hand, the syntactic order most recognized is the prefixation of the genitive:
- De Antonio sus amigas
There are also disorders of agreement, gender, etc.
This dialect is spoken in the region of Tumbes.
- Garatea Grau, Carlos (2010). Tras una lengua de Papel. El español del Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. p. 281. ISBN 978-9972-42-923-1.
- Miranda Esquerre, Luis (1998). La entrada del español en el Perú. Lima: Juan Brito/ Editor. pp. 101, 111. ISBN 9972-702-00-6.
- Jorge Pérez et al., Contra el prejuico lingüístico de la motosidad: un estudio de las vocales del castellano andino desde la fonética acústica, Lima: Instituto Riva Agüero. PUCP, 2006
- Cerrón Palomino, Rodolfo (2003). Castellano Andino Aspectos sociolingüísticos, pedagógicos y gramaticales. Lima: Fondo Editorial Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú y GTZ Cooperación Técnica Alemana. p. 118. ISBN 9972-42-528-2.
- Tadeo Hanke, Carácter, genio y costumbres de los limeños, 1801, Concejo Provincial de Lima, 1959, p.50
- Rafael Lapesa, Historia de la lengua española, Editorial Gredos, 1981
- Hildebrandt, Martha (2003). El habla culta (o lo que debiera serlo). Lima. p. 8. ISBN 9972-9454-1-3.