Spanish Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers, students and Spanish language enthusiasts in general wanting to discuss the finer points of the language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Does Spanish have words which can be pronounced with a different number of syllables? For example, in English one can pronounce lightning with 2 syllables, meaning the companion of thunder, and 3 syllables, meaning brightening.
I was wondering if Spanish has such words as well.
Yes, but they tend to be barely perceptible to the average speaker because they tend to be based on dialect. For example, the word guion can be pronounced in one (/'gjon/) or two (/gi'on/) syllables. There is no change in meaning however. As the Ortografía points out:
Estas secuencias [de vocal cerrada átona y vocal abierta tónica], que en España y en una parte de América se articulan en muchos vocablos como hiatos, se pronuncian, en cambio, como diptongos o integrando triptongos en otras zonas, especialmente en México, Centroamérica y parte de las áreas caribeña y andina. Así palabras como piano, enviar, guion, jesuita, diurno o fieis son silabeadas por unos hispnohablantes separando las vocales contiguas en sílabas distintas: [pi.á.no], [em.bi.ár], [gi.ón], [je.su.í.ta], [di.úr.no], [fi.éis]; y por otros, agrupando las vocales dentro de la misma sílaba: [piá.no], [em.biár], [gión], [je.suí.ta], [diúr.no], [fiéis].
Sometimes you can have a hiatus in unstressed syllables and some speakers will have the resulting extra syllable. For example, any word with the prefix bio- which can be either /bi.o/ or /bjo/. The reasons for when someone would use one pronunciation or another are quite varied:
La articulación de determinadas secuencias vocálicas dentro de la misma sílaba o en sílabas distintas no solo depende de la procedencia geográfica, sino que se ve influida asimismo por otros factores, como la posición que la secuencia ocupa dentro de la palabra, la velocidad de emisión, el mayor o meno esmero en la pronunciación, la etimología o la analogía con otras palabras de la misma familia léxica, etc.
But these differences are not (by design) indicated in writing except when they affect the stressed syllable (as in vídeo ~ video, but those are spelt differently so they don't count as an answer to your question :-) ). None of these will affect the meaning of the word, however, as can happen in English read /riːd/ ~ read /rɛd/.
