A reporter on todays’ NPR broadcast of “Morning Edition,” in speaking about the political troubles in Spain over Catalonia, was heard pronouncing the word Catalan with two broad a’s (as in want) in the first and last syllable instead of the normative flat vowel [æ] (as in fan). The reporter (a woman) had evidently never heard this word pronounced correctly and, therefore, took it to be marked (i.e., conceptually restricted), for which the marked broad vowel occurs de rigueur in contemporary American English.

Apropos, readers of this blog are reminded that among the PDFs on the upper portion of the homepage there is the link to my article, “Broad and Flat A in Marked Words,” American Speech 72.4 (1997), 436-439, which to this day provides the definitive explanation of the phenomenon at issue.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO