Detailing the impact of social variables on the production of the Catalan mid-vowel contrasts by early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals

Abstract

The present study investigates variability in the production of Catalan vowels by Barcelona young, middle-aged, and older adults who speak the Central Catalan variety. The degree of exposure to and use of Central Catalan varies among speakers as half of the participants are second-generation and subsequent-generation migrants from other regions of Spain, where the vernacular is Spanish. All speakers have been born, raised, and schooled in Barcelona, and have acquired both Central Catalan and Spanish. Central Catalan possesses two sets of phonemic mid-vowels (/e/–/ε/ and /o/–/ↄ/), unlike Spanish which has a single vowel per set (/e/ and /o/). This study aims to detail the Catalan mid-front and mid-back vowel contrasts used by speakers of different gender, age, language use, and exposure to Catalan from the bilingual speech community of Barcelona.

Keywords

• speech production
• language contact
• variability in production
• mid-vowel contrasts
• language-dominant group