A couple of days a week, Dr. Joan Veny i Clar (Campos, 1932) still goes to work at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. The great dialectologist of Catalan, Catalan Literature Honorary Award 2015He is a devotee of words. After more than sixty years of work, he has been able to see the great quest of his life come to fruition.Linguistic Atlas of the Catalan Domainwhich she co-edited with Lídia Pons, also a professor at the University of Barcelona. It is a fundamental work for understanding the richness of linguistic diversity throughout the Catalan-speaking world and ranks among the major reference works on the Catalan language.

Armed with a tape recorder, from 1964 to 1978, summer after summer, philologists from the University of Barcelona combed through 190 towns and villages across the Catalan-speaking world, interviewing elderly people who still spoke the most authentic language of each place. From Salsas to Guardamar and from Fraga to Alghero—passing through places like Àger, Chiva de Morella, Pollensa, Mora la Nova, Arbeca, Barcelona, ​​and Begur—the goal was to discover which words were used in everyday life, what the Catalans called words related to frost or harvest. potato, lamb and washAll the dialectal richness of Catalan is frozen and preserved in one of the great works that our language already possesses, theLinguistic Atlas of the Catalan Domain (ALDC), published by the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC), which the institution considers complete after more than 60 years of work.

The great Catalan dialectologist Joan Veny (Campos, 1932), at 93 years old, continues to dedicate a few hours a day to the study of the etymology and dialectal variety of words. He seals his commitment to Catalan by going every week to his office at the Institut d'Estudis Catalans to continue working with the meticulousness and passion with which he created seminal works such as Catalan speech and theLinguistic Atlas of the Catalan DomainThe years have not diminished his enjoyment of language. Therefore, he says that due to his "professional deformation," he can't help but notice this aspect when he reads for pleasure, especially poetry and, much less, fiction. As for poetry, he immediately recommends the book by Sebastià Alzamora Augusta Hall (Proa), which "is a delight." Through two long poems, Alzamora speaks of collective and personal memory: "It speaks of the mother and of Franco's persecution," says Veny. "It's a poem that appears simple, but it reaches you deeply," he declares.