Phonology: case studies
By Scott Myers and Megan Crowhurst
Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas
Vowel Reduction
All dialects of Catalan have the vowel phonemes /i u e ɛ o ɔ a/. The chart in (1) provides specifications in phonological features for these vowels.
| (1) Feature specifications for the vowels of Catalan. |
The recordings of the following words show how these vowels sound in Central Catalan. (These vowels have the same qualities in Mallorquí.)
| (2) Examples showing vowel contrasts. |
| bici | [bisi] | 'bike' |
| puc | [puk] | 'I can' |
| tomb | [tom] | 'walk, stroll' |
| pot | [pɔt] | 's/he can' |
| fet | [fet] | 'made' |
| peu | [pɛw] | 'foot' |
| cap | [kap] | 'no' |
The words in (2) were chosen to demonstrate that the seven vowels in chart (1) are distinctive. As we will see in this module, however, these contrasts are not equally represented in all surface contexts in Catalan dialects. Moreover, in addition to the vowels in (1) and (2), all Catalan dialects have a central vowel [ə], schwa, which is not contrastive but surfaces as an allophone of other vowels in contexts to be discussed in the next sections.