The site

The site Guies de pronunciació del català (Pronunciation Guidelines for Catalan) is managed by the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics of the Universitat of Barcelona, with the collaboration of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona. Its objective is to offer learning materials regarding the pronunciation of Catalan (till now, the eastern —and most spoken— dialect) as a second or foreign language. These materials have been designed to deal with the pronunciation of Catalan from three different but complementary perspectives. First, the articulation of the Catalan sounds that can be hard to utter; secondly, the learning of its prosody through typical Catalan speech acts and, finally, the learners’ corporal disposition before and during the trainings proposed.

The materials present on this site seek to complete other existing resources with regard to the pronunciation and description of the sounds of Catalan. Moreover, they also offer activities that allow an autonomous learning and which include aspects of the Catalan culture (songs, sayings and proverbs, tongue-twisters, etc.). As regards the working process, some self-correcting exercises and others based on repetition of models are offered, as well as the possibility of working with the materials in a video or audio format and in two different speeds (natural and slower).

This open-access tool includes many learning itineraries according to the mother tongue (till now, there is only Spanish), and also different paths depending on the level of Catalan of the potential users (basic or advanced).