Book excerpt: This volume contains a selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the 30th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, focussing on the areas of phonology and language variation. The papers address issues in phonology such as the emergence of the unmarked, representational structure in phonology and morphology, intonation in Spanish, and issues in variation including dialectal differences, codeswitching, foreigner talk, and language death. The papers in this volume include discussions of the major Romance languages (Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish), pidgins and creoles resulting from contact with Romance languages, and relationships with languages from other families, such as English and Dutch.