Balearic is the collective name for the dialects of Catalan spoken in the Balearic Islands: mallorquí in Mallorca, eivissenc in Ibiza, and menorquí in Menorca. At the last census, 746,792 people in the Balearic Islands claimed to be able to speak Catalan, though some of these people may be speakers of mainland variants.
Features
Distinctive features of Catalan in the Balearic Islands differ according to the specific variant being spoken.
Phonetic features
;Vowels
Most variants preserve a vocalic system of eight stressed vowels;,,,,,,, :
* The Majorcan system has eight stressed vowels, reduced to four in unstressed position.
* The Western Minorcan system has eight stressed vowels, reduced to three in unstressed position.
* The Eastern Minorcan and Ibizan system has seven stressed vowels reduced to three in unstressed position. There are differences between the dialect spoken in Ibiza Town and those of the rest of the island and Formentera.
* The vowel is central in Ibizan, while it is front in Majorcan and Minorcan.
*The so-called "open vowels", and, are generally as low as in most Balearic subvarieties. The phonetic realizations of approaches and is as open as . In many Majorcan dialects can be unrounded to.
* In the most of parts of Majorca, words with ante-penultimate stress ending in -ia lose the ; e.g. glòria is pronounced as glòri.
;Consonants Notes:
In Majorcan and some Minorcan subvarieties and become palatal, and, before front vowels and word-finally; e.g. figuera .
As Central Catalan is velarized,, in all instances; e.g. tela .
The palatal lateral approximant is preserved, with absence of yeísmoexcept for the most Castilianized speakers. Nevertheless, in most of Majorcan occurs :ca:Iodització|iodització, that is, a parallel process to yeísmo. Notice, this phenomenon is more restricted than yeísmo as initial L-palatalization always remains lateral in Majorcan; e.g. lluna .
Depalatalization of syllable-final and with compensatory diphthongization in Majorcan: troncs , anys .
Most Balearic variants preserve final stops in clusters; e.g.,,, and : camp 'field'.
Assimilation of intervocalic clusters in some Majorcan and Minorcan subvarieties: ; ; ; ; ; ;, etc..
Balearic is the variant of Catalan with the strongest tendency not to pronounce historical final in any context; e.g. amor 'love', cor 'heart'.
;Prosody
Except in Ibiza, in combinations of verb and weak pronoun, the accent moves to the final element; e.g. comprar-ne or .
Morphosyntactic features
Balearic preserves the salatdefinite article, a feature shared only with Sardinian among extant Romance languages, but which was more common in other Catalan and Gascon areas in ancient times. However, the salat definite article is also preserved along the Costa Brava and in the Valencian municipalities of Tàrbena and La Vall de Gallinera.
The personal article en/na, n' is used before personal names.
In verbs of the first conjugation, the first and second person plural forms end in -am and -au respectively. For example, cantam, cantau.
Also in verbs of the first conjugation, the imperfect subjunctive is formed with -a-, e.g. cantàs, cantassis. However, the Standard Catalan forms in are nowadays also common in many places.
In combinations of two unstressed pronouns preceding a verb, one direct with the form el, la, etc. and the other indirect with the form me, te, etc., the direct pronoun appears first. For example, la me dóna, Standard Catalan me la dóna.
Lexical features
Balearic has a large quantity of characteristic vocabulary, especially archaisms preserved by the isolation of the islands and the variety of linguistic influences which surround them. The lexicon differs considerably depending on the subdialect. For example: al·lot for standard "noi", moix for "gat", besada for "petó", ca for "gos", doblers for "diners", horabaixa for "tarda" and rata-pinyada for "rat-penat".
Minorcan has a few English loanwords dating back to the British occupation, such as grevi, xumaquer, boínder, xoc or ull blec.
Political questions
Some in the Balearic Islands, such as the Partido Popularparty member and former regional president, José Ramón Bauzà, argue that the dialects of Baleric Islands are actually separate languages and not dialects of Catalan. Bauzà has campaigned against having centralized or standardized standards of Catalan in public education.
