NY – The combination of “ny” is pronounced like the Spanish ñ–a soft N-sound that doesn’t appear in English.

K, W – The letters K and W appear only in assimilated foreign words and their derivatives such as in Nova York or clown.

lustració is pronounced /il-oo-stra-SIO/, almost identical to how it’s said in Latin Spanish.

(Also identical to the singular L sound in other Catalan and Spanish words.) The word il

l – – In Catalan, a piece of punctuation that separates two L’s simply means the L sound similar to the English L in “like”.

(A soft L-sound which is produced by laying the tongue flat against the roof of the mouth.) So llengua is pronounced in Catalan as it would be in Spanish. Ll – In Catalan, the double L sound is identical to the Spanish double L sound. This word alçar is pronounced /al-SA/, not /al-CA/ or /al-CAR/.

Ç – In Catalan, this ç is pronounced like an S (just like in French). The Catalan alphabet is virtually identical to the English or Spanish ones, with some special differences. In the next section, we’ll go over how to practically use them, as well as consonant sounds as part of learning how to read in Catalan. Here, we mostly covered making vowels sounds. That’s because their vowel sounds aren’t as extremely placed in the mouth as a Spanish speaker’s. The Catalan word “però” will sometimes sound like “peru”, “pro” “pru”, or even “paru” depending on the region the speaker is from. But the mouth is slightly more closed and the tongue slightly more relaxed. The Catalan word “sí” is spelled identically to the Spanish equivalent. If you’re learning Catalan, the best way to think about these is that these unstressed vowels are a bit more “relaxed” and not as firm as their Spanish counterparts.īecause the second change is that even sounds that Spanish and Catalan have in common are a bit different. Standard Catalan (as it’s taught in Barcelona) also has a relatively simple vowel chart with two main differences.įirst, Catalan has a few vowel sounds that are “in between” some Spanish vowels.Īn un-stressed Catalan e will sometimes sound A-ish.Īn unstressed Catalan O will sometimes sound U-ish.

Assimil catalan pdf