This book reflects on the Spanish of Catalonia and furnishes documentary resources for studying colloquial Spanish spoken in naturally occurring social groups in Barcelona. Part I addresses many complex issues necessary to appropriately contextualize Spanish language usage in Barcelona and linguistic analysis of such usage, with discussions of language contact, ethnolinguistic identities, language ideologies, ways of speaking, corpus-based research, fieldwork methodology, and speaker profiles. Part II presents the first known publication of orthographically transcribed spoken language corpus data from colloquial Spanish conversations in naturally occurring social groups in Catalonia. Despite previous explicit calls for such publications, Spanish in Catalonia still remains largely unrecognized in Spanish dialectology. By providing substantial transcripts of spoken language data, metadata, and general access resources to document actual ways of speaking Spanish in Barcelona, this monograph provides a linguistic record that both recognizes the legitimacy of this Spanish dialect and facilitates its linguistic description and analysis. The volume thus contributes to scholarship in Spanish sociolinguistics and dialectology, documentary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, and the sociology of language. This work will appeal to academics worldwide in these and related fields (e.g. contact linguistics, discourse analysis, Hispanic studies, and Catalan studies), to Spanish teachers, and to the community studied.

"This book is an important contribution to studies of Catalan Spanish and provides a much needed resource for future researchers... Vann’s contribution in this book is twofold. First, he documents the Spanish of Catalonia, a regional variety of Spanish that has received increasing academic recognition in the past decade. Vann provides an excellent overview of the historical, political and social context of Spanish/Catalan language contact and the development of Catalan Spanish as a regional dialect. In addition, he analyzes the language ideologies of academic discourse and their role in the inadequate recognition that the Spanish of Catalonia has received in traditional studies of Spanish dialectology. Second, Vann provides an outstanding resource for researchers on Catalan Spanish: the transcripts of colloquial, naturally-occurring conversations within two naturally constituted social networks in Barcelona, comprising part of his larger corpus of Catalan Spanish. Importantly, he offers a clear explanation of the methods used to collect, digitize and transcribe the recordings and provides extensive extralinguistic data on the participants so that the transcriptions can be used by researchers who wish to analyze the characteristics of Catalan Spanish." -Dr. Carol A. Klee, University of Minnesota

"Professor Vann's pioneering work clearly breaks new ground in the field of Hispanic Linguistics, bringing principles of dialectology and sociolinguistics to bear upon a carefully collected and painstakingly analyzed corpus of oral data collected in Barcelona in 1995 from spontaneous colloquial conversations held by members of two social networks involving about fifty-eight speakers. His study casts a new light on Catalan Spanish, presenting this variety as a legitimate regional dialect of the Spanish language that plays a significant role as a marker of ethnic and cultural identity and as a factor of ingroup solidarity... The detailed description of the techniques used in data collection and analysis, together with a transcript in ordinary spelling of a significant portion of the corpus, add to the volume's worth as a very useful language documentation in addition to its intrinsic value as a case study of field work methodology." -Dr. Milton M. Azevedo, UC Berkeley