Spanish and Catalan in Majorca: Are There Contact-Induced Changes in the Catalan Vowel System?

The vowel systems of Catalan and Spanish are considerably different. Spanish has a simple fivevowel symmetrical system, which is the most common number of vowel phonemes cross-linguistically (Hualde, 2005). As shown in Table 1, the vowels contrast along two dimensions: along the height dimension, there are two high vowels (/i/ and /u/), two mid vowels (/e/ and /o/), and one low vowel (/a/); and along the frontness/backness dimension, there are two front vowels (/i/ and /e/), one central vowel (/a/), and two back vowels (/u/ and /o/). In contrast, Catalan has a seven-vowel symmetrical system with an additional contrast in height, distinguishing higher-mid vowels /e/ and /o/ from lowermid vowels / / and / / in stressed syllables, as shown in Table 2. Moreover, the variety of Catalan spoken in Majorca has the additional vowel phoneme / /, which may appear both in stressed and unstressed position (Recasens, 1991).