Abstract
This chapter presents the main issues related to corpora in the Catalan language. It opens with a discussion of some general matters associated with corpora and empirical perspectives in linguistics, and provides a brief history of Catalan language corpora, taking into account the sociolinguistic conditions under which Catalan corpora have been developed which can explain the present situation and shortcomings in comparison with other languages. The main section provides a detailed inventory of the most important spoken and written corpora of the Catalan language, giving special attention to their structure, annotation and accessibility. Finally, the concluding remarks make some suggestions for how Catalan corpora should proceed in the future in order to maintain, or to regain, their rightful position among the rest of the European languages.