Phonology: case studies
By Scott Myers and Megan Crowhurst
Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas
Catalan sound inventories
Catalan Consonant Inventory
Catalan has the phonetic inventory of consonants shown below. In this below, consonants that are not contrastive in Catalan, but occur only as allophones of other consonants are shown in parentheses. All other consonants in the chart are fully contrastive. Sounds are transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
| Obstruents | Stops | b |
d |
(ɟ) |
g |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fricatives | (β) |
(v) |
(ð) |
z |
ʒ |
(γ) |
||
| Affricates | (dz) |
(ʤ) |
||||||
| Sonorants | Nasals | |||||||
| Liquids | ||||||||
| Rhotics | ||||||||
| Glide |
Catalan Vowel Inventory
Catalan has the vowels shown in the chart below. Schwa is not contrastive, but is the result of a vowel reduction process discussed the Vowel Reduction section of this module.
| Catalan vowels | |||
| [+high] | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| [-high] | ɛ |
ɔ |
|
| [+low] |