Situated at the intersection of Spanish sociolinguistics, Spanish dialectology, and Spanish in contact, this book offers readers “the materials to study some of the linguistic features present in ways of speaking Spanish in naturally occurring social networks in Catalonia as well as the sociocultural meanings of such ways of speaking” (p. xi). The book has two main parts: Part I, comprised of six chapters, provides a “Critical introduction to the Vann corpus” and Part II, broken into two chapters, reproduces “Selected transcripts from the Vann corpus.”

Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu's (1991) Language and Symbolic Power (Harvard University Press), chapter 1 introduces the notions of habitus, linguistic capital, and symbolic power as they pertain to the political economy of language in Catalonia, with particular emphasis on Barcelona, its capital. Through this lens, Vann traces the history of Catalan Spanish through nine stages from its origins as a language of privilege, through the economic shift to the region of Castile which repositioned Catalan as a low prestige variety, to its modern-day status as a language that has regained legal authority, but one that is also “an important modern expression of Catalan identities and ideologies” (p. 6). Building on the connection between these ideologies, identities, and the political economy of Catalan, chapter 2 examines the ways in which previous scholars have treated the study of Catalan. In particular, Vann investigates the under-documentation of Catalan in research on Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics through its sociohistoric, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic contexts, ultimately demonstrating the need for further language documentation. Chapter 3 details the existing spoken Spanish language corpora in Catalonia and demonstrates the uniqueness of the Vann corpus as “it is the only corpus that represents colloquial conversations in Catalan Spanish between individuals from naturally occurring social groups in Catalonia” (p. 59). Chapter 4 reviews previous corpus-based findings on Catalan, which are grouped broadly into the categories of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and the use of Spanish in Catalonia. Chapter 5 explicitly outlines Vann's field methods of data collection and his processes of language digitization and transcription. Additionally, he outlines several helpful suggestions for best practices in linguistic corpus construction. Chapter 6 profiles the speakers whose conversation samples are available in Part II, including their demographics, personal and familial linguistic practices, languages of instruction in school, ties to Catalan vs. Castellano societies, and language ideologies.

Part II provides selected transcripts from the Vann corpus. Chapter 1 documents 60 minutes of a 4 participant conversation and chapter 2 documents 93 minutes of a separate 4 participant conversation. Adhering to transcription practices that allow for ease of readability and best represent the speech community, Vann utilizes minimal markup and sticks to orthographic spelling conventions in the transcription samples. Altogether, this volume offers a thorough overview of the state of research on Catalan Spanish and offers a unique selection of authentic conversational language excerpts from two Catalan speech communities, offering a valuable contribution to the study of language ideologies, identities, and sociolinguistic variation in Catalan.