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, morphological, 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 language: speakers between 3 and 20 years of age. The data obtained allows us to observe a phonetic change directly connected to writing.I would like to thank Carlos van Oosterzee and James McCullough for discussion. This research was supported by HUM2004-01504/FILO (MEC & FEDER).