AND MARIA DEL MAR VANRELL 2.1 Introduction 2.1.1 Geographical distribution of the Catalan language Catalan is a Romance language that is spoken by about 10 million people in a region that lies within four adjacent European states, Andorra, Italy, France, and Spain. 1 Fig. 2.1 shows a map of the geographical areas where Catalan is spoken, subdivided into its major and traditionally accepted dialects (Veny 1982): Central Catalan and Northwestern Catalan (spoken in Catalonia, Aragon, and Andorra), Valencian Catalan (Valencian region), Balearic Catalan (Balearic Islands), Northern Catalan (in the Roussillon region of southern France, roughly equivalent to the current département of Pyrénées-Orientales), and Algherese Catalan (in the city of l'Alguer, Sardinia). Breaking down the total number of roughly 10 million Catalan speakers by geographic area, Catalonia and the Valencian region provide the great majority, with 5,703,000 and 2,952,000 respectively, followed by the Balearic community with 735,000 speakers. The remaining territories provide much smaller figures, with 61,000 speakers in Andorra, 142,000 speakers in southern France, and 24,000 in the city of l'Alguer (Sardinia, Italy) (data from Pons and Sorolla 2009). With respect to its legal status, Catalan is the official language in Andorra; within Spain it is co-official 1 The data comes from the Enquesta dels usos lingüístics a Catalunya 2003, coordinated by J. Torres and updated by Pons and Sorolla (2009) and Querol (2010).

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The aim of this paper is to account for the phonological adaptation of loanwords in Eastern Catalan. As the phonology of these new words deviates from that of the native Catalan vocabulary set (with a certain amount of variation among speakers), the new phonetic features would seem to be borrowed from Spanish. We suggest that a new phonology has emerged whose purpose is to identify loans among the lexicon, the most striking element of this phonology being a harmony effect on stressed mid vowels in the presence of post-tonic [+ATR] mid vowels. The existence of unstressed [+ATR] mid vowels [e, o] in Eastern Catalan has been previously interpreted as lexical exceptions to vowel reduction (Fabra 1912 and Mascaró 2002, among others). However, the phonetic variation in the new lexicon is analyzed here as being fully consistent with Catalan phonology within the theory of lexical strata (Itô & Mester 1999).

Spanish stress shows a uniform pattern in verbal forms. For stressed roots in particular, the unmarked position is the last vowel. Nevertheless, first conjugation roots ending in a high vowel display two opposite behaviours: while one group follows the unmarked pattern (e.g. envío 'I send'), the other group keeps the high vowel unstressed, thus always becoming a glide (e.g. cambio 'I change'). While nominals related to the latter group exhibit the same stress position as the first conjugation (e.g. cambio [kámbjo] 'change', cambio [kámbjo] 'I change'), this is not true of nominals related to the former group, since we find some cases with stress shift (e.g. amplio [ámpljo] 'large', amplío [amplío] 'I enlarge') and other cases without this change (e.g. envío [embío] 'shipment', envío [embío] 'I send'). The goal of this paper is to account for these facts (including the lack of pairs such as *amplío [amplío] 'large' and *amplio [ámpljo] 'I enlarge') and analyze the prosodic and morphological factors determining glide formation.

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