Catalan

Abstract

This chapter presents a general overview of the phonetics and phonology of Catalan, taking into consideration both segmental and suprasegmental phenomena. The chapter provides an updated state-of-the-art report of the most recent investigations in this area. Though the report concentrates on the standard variety, Central Catalan, we also highlight the rich dialectal variation that affects both segmental and prosodic properties. After a brief introduction to the dialectal distribution of the language, the first part of the chapter is devoted to segmental phonology. In this part, we first present the basic segmen-tal inventories of the language, as well as syllable structure types; we then describe the phonological processes that affect both vocalic and consonantal systems. The prosodic part of the chapter covers the main prosodic characteristics of the language, followed by a description of the intonational variation found for a variety of sentence types.