Some connections between linguistic change and the written language: The behavior of speakers aged 3 to 20 Josefina Carrera-Sabaté Universitat de Barcelona ABSTRACT After the Franco dictatorship, written Catalan started to be taught officially in the schools of Catalonia. This teaching has involved a change in some phonetic, mor- phological, and lexical habits, especially among speakers schooled in Catalan as a first language. The present study shows a linguistic change process observed in Northwestern Catalan linguistic communities. Its focus is the study of absolute initial prestressed vowels spelled ^ e& which have traditionally been uttered with solution [a] in forms such as encara ‘yet’ or estudi ‘study’. The population analyzed is the one that is receiving or has received the biggest influence from written lan- guage: speakers between 3 and 20 years of age. The data obtained allows us to observe a phonetic change directly connected to writing. The oral language learning process is gradual and is directly connected with the biological development of individuals and the social and cultural influences that they receive throughout their lives, especially during their raising and their edu- cation stage. This is why children’s sociocultural modeling goes through different general and particular linguistic filters according to the environment in which they develop (see Guy & Boyd, 1990; Labov, 1989; Roberts & Labov, 1995). Among the general filters, the dialectal variety spoken by each member of a speech community is a determining factor. Among the particular filters, their social status becomes decisive. Apart from this, written language can also influence the linguistic manifesta- tions of each individual, and in more literate societies, it seems to affect their speakers’oral language (see, e.g., van Bergem, 1995). However, in societies where only a minority has knowledge of the written language, this knowledge is unlikely to modify the speakers’ oral uses. If we relate these general points to the trajectory of oral Catalan 1 in Catalonia from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, we will observe some coincidences among the linguistic communities just described, to put it simply. The resulting speech communities must be associated with generalization of schooling and the social spread of Spanish in the following stages: I would like to thank Carlos van Oosterzee and James McCullough for discussion. This research was supported by HUM2004-015040 FILO (MEC & FEDER). Language Variation and Change, 18 (2006), 15–34. Printed in the U.S.A. © 2006 Cambridge University Press 0954-3945006 $9.50 DOI: 10.10170S0954394506060017 15