Language documentation is valuable to the study of linguistic variation in communities undergoing rapid language shift (Woodbury Reference Woodbury, Austin and Sallabank2011), and its value extends to language varieties regardless of their endangerment status (Macri Reference Macri, Grenoble and Furbee2010). In Documenting Gen ‘95er voices from Catalonia, Robert Vann provides three complementary forms of documentary evidence from the unique and culturally complex setting of Catalonia: reproductions and translations of language-related artifacts from the Catalan normalization project of the 1980s and 1990s; orthographic transcriptions and English translations of Spanish- and Catalan-language discourse produced by participants in 2017; and a variationist analysis of longitudinal data concerning participants’ identities and ideologies. While the historical and documentary materials in Part 1 address Catalonia more broadly, the analyses in Parts 2 and 3 center on thirty-five individuals from two areas of metropolitan Barcelona. Together, these materials constitute a welcome contribution to documentary linguistics while also offering insights of broader relevance to the study of language and globalization.

In the introduction, Vann lays out the principal aim of the monograph, which is to document, through interviews, the communicative practices of thirty-five individuals from two areas of metropolitan Barcelona. These interviews, which were conducted in 2017 shortly before the 2017 Catalan independence referendum and ensuing political crisis, build on a long-term language documentation project that Vann and colleagues have been assembling for over three decades. These thirty-five individuals also participated in fieldwork that Vann carried out in 1995, allowing for a longitudinal angle through which Vann documents an evolution in these individuals’ uses of linguistic practices from indexing processes of (trans)localization in the early years of the Catalan-language normalization project to orienting toward processes of globalization in the contemporary era. He introduces the macro discursive tropes of fer país ‘nation building’ and fer futur ‘future building’ to describe this evolution. Vann also highlights why the linguistic practices of these individuals are particularly worthy of investigation: they belong to what he calls the ‘Generation of 1995’ in Catalonia (the ‘Gen ‘95ers’ of the book’s title), the first Catalans educated in Catalan to have progressed to university studies in contemporary Spain following decades of state repression and severe restrictions on the public use of Catalan under the Franco dictatorship. As this group progressed through adulthood, their linguistic practices and worldviews developed alongside Catalonia’s post-Franco social transformation and rapid language shift.

Following the introduction, the volume is organized into three parts grounded respectively in the sociology of language, the ethnography of speaking, and variationist sociolinguistics. Part 1, theoretically rooted in the sociology of language, situates Gen ‘95ers within the sociohistorical context of their formative years and adolescence. Vann describes the period from 1975 to 1998 as marked by the ‘institutional inculcation’ (36) of pro-Catalan language ideologies, intended to normalize the use of Catalan across all domains of life and to counteract the language’s prolonged suppression, particularly during the Franco dictatorship. Chapter 2 highlights the importance of the dissemination of mass media in Catalan, the Catalan immersion program in schools, and other governmental policies aimed at language revitalization. Chapter 3 discusses contributions toward this aim from the Catholic Church, the Universitat de Barcelona, and popular culture.

One of the volume’s key contributions is Vann’s interpretation of language-related artifacts from the Catalan normalization project of the 1980s and 1990s issued by the government (chapter 4) and local businesses, associations, and universities (chapter 5). These artifacts, many of which have not previously been reproduced and translated for an English-language readership, reveal widespread ideological trends that permeated the cultural setting in which Gen ‘95ers grew up. For example, normalization materials produced by the government marketed Catalan as an inclusive sociocultural leveler capable of overcoming sociolinguistic divisions and incorporating people of different backgrounds into a shared Catalan society. This representation shows that normalization was not simply about increasing Catalan use, but also about promoting a particular model of Catalan belonging. Another ideological trend is the framing of language normalization as a collective civic responsibility aimed at redressing the historical marginalization of Catalan, a framing that positions language choice as socially and morally consequential.

In Part 2, Vann provides an ethnographic analysis of oral histories produced by thirty-five individuals in interviews conducted in 2017. These thirty-five individuals were originally part of a larger sixty-person sample organized around two fieldworkers and members of their first-order social networks, whom Vann recruited in 1995 with the aim of representing two linguistically and demographically diverse areas of metropolitan Barcelona. Their ways of speaking are presented in orthographic transcriptions that are largely in Spanish, with occasional shifts into Catalan, alongside translations in English.

Part 2 provides the interpretive heart of the monograph, directly addressing the aim identified in the introduction (and the title) by documenting Gen ‘95er voices. Through a carefully structured analysis, Vann organizes the participants’ oral histories into motifs relating language to identity (chapter 6), cultural malaise in Catalonia in 2017 (chapter 7), political economy and democracy (chapter 8), and the right to self-determination and the separatist project (chapter 9). Vann’s dissection of each motif into component tropes leaves the reader with a clear sense of how participants’ linguistic practices demonstrate an evolution from a localized, nation-building focus to a more globalized, future-building orientation. In this vein, one particularly noteworthy finding is that, for all but two participants, constructions of Catalan identity in 2017 no longer necessarily entailed the use of the Catalan language, marking a shift from the ‘localizing linguistic tribalism’ (319) that had permeated the group’s worldviews in 1995. Finally, his account of the relative prevalence of the tropes across participants adds a quantitative dimension to the rich ethnographic analysis.

A unique strength of this volume is that the thirty-five individuals whose oral histories are analyzed in Part 2 previously participated in fieldwork that Vann carried out in 1995, allowing for a longitudinal analysis of language ideologies across a twenty-two-year period. This longitudinal perspective comprises the focus of Part 3 and is presented from the perspective of variationist sociolinguistics. In chapter 10, Vann details the framework for the quantitative analyses discussed in chapter 11. The research presented in chapter 11 makes a novel contribution to variationist scholarship on Catalonia not only because of its multidecade scope but also because it includes data collected from adults, thus supplementing a substantial body of prior research focused on adolescents.

Although Vann details his methods with admirable precision and presents an undeniably robust set of quantitative analyses, some of the chapter’s key findings become obscured by the density of the statistical discussion. Most notably, participants reported significantly more Catalanist ideologies in 2017 than in 1995, while greater exposure to Catalan and greater involvement in Catalan community life predicted more Catalanist ideologies in both datasets. Over time, however, involvement eclipsed exposure as a unique predictor. Together, these findings highlight the importance of both early exposure to Catalan and evolving patterns of social involvement in shaping language ideologies over time. This broader interpretive picture, however, is not always readily apparent amid the individual quantitative analyses, and chapter 11 would have benefited from additional synthesis connecting them. For readers approaching the volume from traditions such as the sociology of language or ethnography of communication, the methodological transition to the variationist analyses of Part 3 may therefore be less immediately accessible.

At the same time, Vann does provide astute interpretations of the longitudinal survey data in chapter 12 through qualitative sociolinguistic analysis. In particular, he offers evidence of ‘emergent coding’ (24), demonstrating how local understandings of terms such as catalanes ‘Catalans’, castellanos ‘Castilians’, españoles ‘Spaniards’, Cataluña ‘Catalonia’, España ‘Spain’, el pueblo (catalán) ‘the (Catalan) people’, and el estado español ‘the Spanish state’ have changed over time. Overall, the mixed-methods presentation of Part 3 adds longitudinal depth to an already impressive documentary effort.

In the conclusion, Vann offers thoughtful commentary on the implications of his work and potential future directions for language and globalization research beyond Catalonia. He points to indigenous ways of speaking languages of wider communication in communities undergoing rapid language shift as a particularly fruitful potential endeavor, noting that relatively little work in the field of language documentation currently concerns major world languages.

Taken together, these diverse data types and analytical approaches constitute a robust and holistic contribution that aligns with contemporary priorities in documentary linguistics. Beyond documenting language behavior through records of spoken discourse in context, Vann highlights how linguistic creativity serves ideological ends and explores the construction of social identities amid language shift during an extraordinary period in Catalonia’s history. In this way, the monograph offers an unusually rich documentary record of the linguistic practices and metalinguistic reflections of thirty-five individuals from metropolitan Barcelona.