Catalan dialects

[4] In 1861, linguist Manuel Milà i Fontanals split Catalan into two main dialectal blocks: Western and Eastern.

Castellonenc: l'Alcalatén, el Pla de l'Arc, la Plana Alta and Baixa.

Lower Southern: the towns on the South of the line that connects the localities of Biar and Busot.

Catalan has inherited the typical vowel system of Vulgar Latin, with seven stressed phonemes: /a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u/, a common feature in Western Romance, except Spanish, Asturian, and Aragonese.

[22] In Eastern Catalan (except most of Majorcan), unstressed vowels reduce to three: /a, e, ɛ/ → [ə]; /o, ɔ, u/ → [u]; /i/ remains distinct.

[22] Note, the quality of vowels also varies across dialects, and they may present a wide range of contextual allophones.

Catalan and Valencian dialects are characterised by final-obstruent devoicing, lenition and voicing assimilation.

Most Catalan and Valencian dialects are also renowned by the usage of dark l (i.e. velarisation of /l/ → [ɫ]), which is especially noticeable in syllable final position, in comparison to neighbouring languages, such as Spanish, Italian and French (that lack this pronunciation).

Despite its relative lexical unity, the two dialectal blocks of Catalan (Eastern and Western) show some differences in word choices.