Standard Spanish
Encyclopedia
Standard Spanish or neutral Spanish is a linguistic variety, or lect
, that is considered a correct educated standard
for the Spanish language
. Standard Spanish is not merely Spanish adjusted to fit in prescriptive molds dictated by a linguistic overseeing authority
, but also a form of language that conforms to the literary
canon and cultural tradition
. Most aspects of this standard variety, from grammar
and prosody
to phonetics
and lexicon
, are therefore different, to some degree, from everyday common usage.
of all varieties of Spanish
; it is a different lect on its own, and it has some verbal forms that are not found in other linguistic varieties. For example, certain tense
s (e.g. the future perfect
) have virtually disappeared from most of the spoken dialects and survive only in Standard Spanish. The difficulty of perceiving the distinction is in part due to the strong centralized and prescriptive tradition of the Real Academia Española
, whose normative rules relating to grammar and style have historically dominated written, legal and academic language, but also to the fact that Standard Spanish is not a geographically or regionally defined dialect, but a variant that many speakers use more or less regularly along with their own dialects, in formal situations or in the written language. Mastery of written Standard Spanish is frequently an important requirement to correctly perform some prestigious professions and activities, such as liberal arts
, teaching
or media
.
dialect more than on any other variety. This prominence of Castilian is based not only on the political dominance of
Castile and the military prestige of its leading role in the Reconquista
, but also on the propagation of that dialect outside its original area through folk balads and recitations about Castilian heroes of the Reconquista, such as the Poem of the Cid
. Early steps toward standardization of Castilian were taken in the 13th century by King Alfonso X of Castile
("Alfonso el Sabio"), who assembled scribes and translators at his court and exerted some
oversight to insure that they wrote in "castellano derecho" (correct Castilian). The first grammar of Castilian
(or of any modern European language) was published in 1492 by Antonio de Nebrija
. Further commentary on the language was offered by Juan de Valdés
with his Diálogo de la lengua in 1535.
is less "prestigious" than that of Valladolid
—in the Americas, Castile quickly lost its influence over the spoken language. Even in the administrative centers of Lima
and Mexico City
the phonetics and the grammar of the American dialects were notably modified. Nonetheless, the situation was very different for the written language, where variations are less. For this greater stability in the written register, frequently cited as causes are the early academic predominance of Peninsular universities
and the centralization of administrative and legal authority in Spain during the colonial period.
In 1713, with the foundation of the Real Academia Española
, part of the Academy's explicit purpose was the normalization of the language, "to fix the words and expressions of the Castilian language with the greatest possible propriety, elegance and purity". Throughout the 18th century the Academy developed means of standardization. Between 1726 and 1793 it published a "dictionary of the Castilian language, in which the true sense of the words is explained, as well as their nature and quality, along with the phrases and forms of speech, and the proverbs, sayings, and other matters pertinent to the use of the language". In 1741 the Academy published an Orthography of the Spanish Language, and in 1771 a Grammar of the Spanish Language. The language of the colonies began to be recorded in dictionaries as "Americanisms", beginning in the 19th century.
to propose the formation of branch academies in the Spanish-speaking republics. The project encountered some opposition among local intellectuals. In Argentina
, for example, Juan Antonio Argerich, suspecting an attempt by Spain at cultural restoration, argued in favor of an independent academy, one that would not be merely "a branch office, a servant to Spanish imperialism", and Juan María Gutiérrez
rejected the naming of a correspondent. However, the proposal was finally accepted, eventually resulting in the founding of the Association of Spanish Language Academies
.
The academies insisted on the preservation of a "common language", based on the upper-class speech of Spain and without regard for the strong influence that indigenous languages of the Americas
and other European languages such as Italian, Portuguese, and English were having on the lexicon and even the grammar of American Spanish. That orientation persisted through the 20th century. A 1918 letter from Ramón Menéndez Pidal
of the Real Academia Española
to the American Association of Teachers of Spanish
on the appearance of the first issue of its journal Hispania suggested:
The priority of written language over spoken language, and of Peninsular Spanish over American varieties, was the central thesis of Menéndez Pidal's letter. The "barbaric character of the American indigenous languages", in his opinion, should prevent them from having any influence over American Spanish. The tutorship of the Academy would take care of the rest. With that he was trying to counteract the prediction made by Andrés Bello
in the prologue (p. xi) to his Grammar of 1847, which warned of the profusion of regional varieties that would "flood and cloud much of what is written in America, and, altering the structure of the language, tend to make it into a multitude of irregular, licencious, barbarian dialects". According to this interlocking linguistic and political viewpoint, only the unity of the "educated" language would guarantee the unity of the Hispanic world. On the other hand, the Colombian philologist Rufino José Cuervo
—who shared Bello's prognosis of the eventual fragmentation of Spanish into a plurality of mutually unintelligible languages (although unlike Bello he celebrated it)—warned against the use of the written medium to measure the unity of the language, considering it a "veil that covers local speech".
This issue was documented poignantly in the 1935 treatise by Amado Alonso
entitled El problema de la lengua en América (The problem of language in [Spanish] America), and was reiterated in 1941 when the scholar Américo Castro
published La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense y su sentido histórico (The linguistic peculiarity of River Plate Spanish and its historical significance). For writers of this viewpoint, the drift away from educated Castilian language was an unmistakable sign of social decay. Castro declared that the peculiarities of Argentine Spanish, especially the voseo
, were symptoms of "universal plebeianism", "base instincts", "inner discontent, [and] resentment upon thinking about submitting to any moderately arduous rule". According to Castro's diagnosis, the strong identity of the Buenos Aires dialect was due to the general acceptance of popular forms at the expense of educated ones. Castro worries above all about the impossibility of immediately perceiving the social class
of the speaker from the traits of his speech. The lack of the "checks and inhibitions" that the upper classes should represent seemed to him an unmistakable sign of social decay.
Castro's text is typical of a widespread view that sees the unity of language as the guardian of national unity, and the upper classes as the guardians of language orthodoxy. Much of Menéndez Pidal's work is aimed at pursuing that goal, recommending greater zeal in the persecution of "incorrect" usage through "the teaching of grammar, doctrinal studies, dictionaries, the dissemination of good models, [and] commentary on the classical authors, or, unconsciously, through the effective example that is propagated through social interaction and literary creation". This kind of classist centralism—common to other colonial languages, especially French—has had lasting influence on the use and teaching of the language. Only recently have some regional varieties (such as voseo
in Argentina) become part of formal education and of the literary language—the latter, thanks largely to the literary naturalism
of the mid-20th century.
, when, for the first time, speakers of different dialects gained immediate access—by radio, television, and, more recently, the Internet—to language from regions speaking a variety different from their own. The weakness of the standard form's influence on spoken language had made standardization a marginal issue in the past, but it now became an important subject for debate.
The lasting influence of linguistic centralism has led some commentators to claim that the problem of fragmentation is non-existent, and that it is enough simply to emulate educated language. One author, for example, repeated the doctrine of Menéndez Pidal when stating that
In any event, in the sphere of spoken language the issue has become problematic since at least the 1950s, when the commercial demands on movie dubbing
studios working with Hollywood
films began to call for the development of a Spanish whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical features would not be recognizable as belonging to any particular country. This goal soon proved to be an elusive one: even if the results could, on occasion, approximate a universally intelligible form, at the same time the process prevented the transmission of a familiar, intimate, or everyday tone. Nevertheless, its continued use has produced a degree of familiarization with a certain abstract phonetics throughout Spanish America. Dubbings for use in Spain, on the other hand, are virtually always made in that country, using European varieties of Spanish.
At the First International Congress of the Spanish Language, held in 1997 in Zacatecas
, Mexico, controversy emerged around the concept of Standard Spanish. Some authors, such as the Spanish writer José Antonio Millán, advocated defining a "common Spanish", composed of the lowest common denominator of most dialects. Others, such as the journalist Fermín Bocos (director of Radio Exterior de España
), denied the existence of a problem, adhering to the traditionalist idea of the superiority of educated Castilian Spanish
over influences from other languages. Finally, experts from the Americas such as Lila Petrella stated that a neutral Spanish language could possibly be developed for use in purely descriptive texts, but that the major variations among dialects with regard to semantics and pragmatics would imply that it is impossible to define a single standard variety that would have the same linguistic value for all Spanish-speakers. Above all, certain grammatical structures are impossible to form in a neutral way, due to differences in the verb conjugations used (e.g. the use of the second-person familiar pronoun vos
in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Central American countries, while most other countries prefer tú, and some Colombians tend to use usted in the informal context—and all three pronouns require different verb conjugations). At least one of the three versions will always sound odd in any given Spanish-speaking country.
Given that a neutral Spanish for all Spanish-speakers is impossible, there are four established standardized "Spanishes" used in translations and, more recently, in film-dubbing by some companies: (1) Castilian
or Peninsular Spanish for Spain; (2) River Plate Spanish
for Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina (using voseo
); (3) Mexican Spanish
for Mexico and Central America (even though the latter is largely voseante
); and (4) another version for the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.
In the television market, Latin America is considered as one territory for distribution and syndication of programmes; for this reason they are dubbed into a Neutral Spanish that avoids idioms and words that may have a coarse meaning in any of the countries in which the programme will be shown. This Latin American Neutral Spanish:
Latin American Neutral Spanish was also formerly distributed with programmes in Spain, but that no longer happens.
Another motivator for the unification of Spanish is the translation by multinational companies of manuals, software, websites, etc. from English to Spanish. It is easier to use a neutral version of Spanish than to create different versions for each country or region. If it were done by country, there would be over twenty versions, and if by region it would be difficult to define which countries belonged to which region, as well as being complicated from the logistical point of view. The result has been to identify a neutral Spanish, a version that tries to avoid regional phenomena such as the Latin American voseo
, or terms that may be identified with specific countries (for example, for 'computer', the term in Spain is ordenador, while in Spanish America the most frequent term is computadora, except in a few areas that prefer computador; and as a result, Microsoft Windows
uses the region-neutral term equipo). This neutral language is developed with the help of glossaries that prescribe the preferred terms and the terms to avoid. It is a common occurrence in the computing field, because it lowers production costs.
Variety (linguistics)
In sociolinguistics a variety, also called a lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation, as well as the standard variety itself...
, that is considered a correct educated standard
Standard language
A standard language is a language variety used by a group of people in their public discourse. Alternatively, varieties become standard by undergoing a process of standardization, during which it is organized for description in grammars and dictionaries and encoded in such reference works...
for the Spanish language
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
. Standard Spanish is not merely Spanish adjusted to fit in prescriptive molds dictated by a linguistic overseeing authority
Real Academia Española
The Royal Spanish Academy is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one other hispanophone nations through the Association of Spanish Language Academies...
, but also a form of language that conforms to the literary
Spanish literature
Spanish literature generally refers to literature written in the Spanish language within the territory that presently constitutes the state of Spain...
canon and cultural tradition
Tradition
A tradition is a ritual, belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes , but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings...
. Most aspects of this standard variety, from grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
and prosody
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
to phonetics
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
and lexicon
Lexicon
In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
, are therefore different, to some degree, from everyday common usage.
Introduction
Standard Spanish is not simply Spanish without idioms and regional mannerisms, that is, the lowest common denominatorLowest common denominator
In mathematics, the lowest common denominator or least common denominator is the least common multiple of the denominators of a set of vulgar fractions...
of all varieties of Spanish
Spanish dialects and varieties
Spanish dialects and varieties are the regional variants of the Spanish language, some of which are quite divergent from one another, especially in pronunciation and vocabulary, and less so in grammar....
; it is a different lect on its own, and it has some verbal forms that are not found in other linguistic varieties. For example, certain tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
s (e.g. the future perfect
Future Perfect
-Album Credits:*Produced by T-Bone Burnett*All Songs Written by Autolux*Engineered by Mike Piersante*Mixed by Dave Sardy*Mastered by Stephen Marcussen *Artwork by Carla Azar-Vinyl releases:...
) have virtually disappeared from most of the spoken dialects and survive only in Standard Spanish. The difficulty of perceiving the distinction is in part due to the strong centralized and prescriptive tradition of the Real Academia Española
Real Academia Española
The Royal Spanish Academy is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one other hispanophone nations through the Association of Spanish Language Academies...
, whose normative rules relating to grammar and style have historically dominated written, legal and academic language, but also to the fact that Standard Spanish is not a geographically or regionally defined dialect, but a variant that many speakers use more or less regularly along with their own dialects, in formal situations or in the written language. Mastery of written Standard Spanish is frequently an important requirement to correctly perform some prestigious professions and activities, such as liberal arts
Liberal arts
The term liberal arts refers to those subjects which in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free citizen to study. Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic were the core liberal arts. In medieval times these subjects were extended to include mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy...
, teaching
Teacher
A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...
or media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
.
Origins
Standard Spanish has come to be based on the CastilianCastilian Spanish
Castilian Spanish is a term related to the Spanish language, but its exact meaning can vary even in that language. In English Castilian Spanish usually refers to the variety of European Spanish spoken in north and central Spain or as the language standard for radio and TV speakers...
dialect more than on any other variety. This prominence of Castilian is based not only on the political dominance of
Castile and the military prestige of its leading role in the Reconquista
Reconquista
The Reconquista was a period of almost 800 years in the Middle Ages during which several Christian kingdoms succeeded in retaking the Muslim-controlled areas of the Iberian Peninsula broadly known as Al-Andalus...
, but also on the propagation of that dialect outside its original area through folk balads and recitations about Castilian heroes of the Reconquista, such as the Poem of the Cid
Cantar de Mio Cid
El Cantar de Myo Çid , also known in English as The Lay of the Cid and The Poem of the Cid is the oldest preserved Spanish epic poem...
. Early steps toward standardization of Castilian were taken in the 13th century by King Alfonso X of Castile
Alfonso X of Castile
Alfonso X was a Castilian monarch who ruled as the King of Castile, León and Galicia from 1252 until his death...
("Alfonso el Sabio"), who assembled scribes and translators at his court and exerted some
oversight to insure that they wrote in "castellano derecho" (correct Castilian). The first grammar of Castilian
Gramática de la lengua castellana
Gramática de la lengua castellana is a book written by Antonio de Nebrija and published in 1492...
(or of any modern European language) was published in 1492 by Antonio de Nebrija
Antonio de Nebrija
Antonio de Lebrija , also known as Antonio de Nebrija, Elio Antonio de Lebrija, Antonius Nebrissensis, and Antonio of Lebrixa, was a Spanish scholar, known for writing a grammar of the Castilian language, credited as one of the first published grammars of a Romance language...
. Further commentary on the language was offered by Juan de Valdés
Juan de Valdés
Juan de Valdés was a Spanish religious writer.He was the younger of twin sons of Fernando de Valdés, hereditary regidor of Cuenca in Castile, where Valdés was born. He has been confused with his twin brother Alfonso...
with his Diálogo de la lengua in 1535.
The old colonies and the Real Academia Española
Even though some dialects of Castile preserve their character as the canonical model in the Iberian Peninsula up to the present time—resulting in the curious phenomenon that the Spanish spoken in MadridMadrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
is less "prestigious" than that of Valladolid
Valladolid
Valladolid is a historic city and municipality in north-central Spain, situated at the confluence of the Pisuerga and Esgueva rivers, and located within three wine-making regions: Ribera del Duero, Rueda and Cigales...
—in the Americas, Castile quickly lost its influence over the spoken language. Even in the administrative centers of Lima
Lima
Lima is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín rivers, in the central part of the country, on a desert coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima...
and Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
the phonetics and the grammar of the American dialects were notably modified. Nonetheless, the situation was very different for the written language, where variations are less. For this greater stability in the written register, frequently cited as causes are the early academic predominance of Peninsular universities
University
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
and the centralization of administrative and legal authority in Spain during the colonial period.
In 1713, with the foundation of the Real Academia Española
Real Academia Española
The Royal Spanish Academy is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one other hispanophone nations through the Association of Spanish Language Academies...
, part of the Academy's explicit purpose was the normalization of the language, "to fix the words and expressions of the Castilian language with the greatest possible propriety, elegance and purity". Throughout the 18th century the Academy developed means of standardization. Between 1726 and 1793 it published a "dictionary of the Castilian language, in which the true sense of the words is explained, as well as their nature and quality, along with the phrases and forms of speech, and the proverbs, sayings, and other matters pertinent to the use of the language". In 1741 the Academy published an Orthography of the Spanish Language, and in 1771 a Grammar of the Spanish Language. The language of the colonies began to be recorded in dictionaries as "Americanisms", beginning in the 19th century.
Cultural colonialism
During the 1880s, a new political situation and the intellectual independence of the former colonies drove the Real Academia EspañolaReal Academia Española
The Royal Spanish Academy is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one other hispanophone nations through the Association of Spanish Language Academies...
to propose the formation of branch academies in the Spanish-speaking republics. The project encountered some opposition among local intellectuals. In Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
, for example, Juan Antonio Argerich, suspecting an attempt by Spain at cultural restoration, argued in favor of an independent academy, one that would not be merely "a branch office, a servant to Spanish imperialism", and Juan María Gutiérrez
Juan María Gutiérrez
Juan María Gutiérrez was an Argentine statesman, jurist, surveyor, historian, critic, and poet.He was a major figure in Argentine liberalism and one of the most prominent promoters of Argentine culture during the 19th century...
rejected the naming of a correspondent. However, the proposal was finally accepted, eventually resulting in the founding of the Association of Spanish Language Academies
Association of Spanish Language Academies
The Association of Spanish Language Academies is the entity which regulates the Spanish language. It was created in Mexico in 1951 and represents the union of all the separate academies in the Spanish-speaking world....
.
The academies insisted on the preservation of a "common language", based on the upper-class speech of Spain and without regard for the strong influence that indigenous languages of the Americas
Indigenous languages of the Americas
Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
and other European languages such as Italian, Portuguese, and English were having on the lexicon and even the grammar of American Spanish. That orientation persisted through the 20th century. A 1918 letter from Ramón Menéndez Pidal
Ramón Menéndez Pidal
Ramón Menéndez Pidal was a Spanish philologist and historian. He worked extensively on the history of the Spanish language and Spanish folklore and folk poetry. One of his main topics was the history and legend of The Cid....
of the Real Academia Española
Real Academia Española
The Royal Spanish Academy is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one other hispanophone nations through the Association of Spanish Language Academies...
to the American Association of Teachers of Spanish
American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese
The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese is a language-specific professional association in the United States that was founded on 29 December 1917 in New York City as the American Association of Teachers of Spanish....
on the appearance of the first issue of its journal Hispania suggested:
The priority of written language over spoken language, and of Peninsular Spanish over American varieties, was the central thesis of Menéndez Pidal's letter. The "barbaric character of the American indigenous languages", in his opinion, should prevent them from having any influence over American Spanish. The tutorship of the Academy would take care of the rest. With that he was trying to counteract the prediction made by Andrés Bello
Andrés Bello
Andrés de Jesús María y José Bello López was a Venezuelan humanist, poet, lawmaker, philosopher, educator and philologist, whose political and literary works constitute an important part of Spanish American culture...
in the prologue (p. xi) to his Grammar of 1847, which warned of the profusion of regional varieties that would "flood and cloud much of what is written in America, and, altering the structure of the language, tend to make it into a multitude of irregular, licencious, barbarian dialects". According to this interlocking linguistic and political viewpoint, only the unity of the "educated" language would guarantee the unity of the Hispanic world. On the other hand, the Colombian philologist Rufino José Cuervo
Rufino José Cuervo
Rufino José Cuervo Urisarri , was a Colombian writer, linguist and philologist.He studied Latin and Greek, but the main part of his work was dedicated to the study of the dialectal variations of Spanish spoken in Colombia...
—who shared Bello's prognosis of the eventual fragmentation of Spanish into a plurality of mutually unintelligible languages (although unlike Bello he celebrated it)—warned against the use of the written medium to measure the unity of the language, considering it a "veil that covers local speech".
This issue was documented poignantly in the 1935 treatise by Amado Alonso
Amado Alonso
Amado Alonso was a Spanish philologist, linguist and literary critic, who became a naturalised citizen of Argentina and one of the founders of stylistics....
entitled El problema de la lengua en América (The problem of language in [Spanish] America), and was reiterated in 1941 when the scholar Américo Castro
Americo Castro
Américo Castro y Quesada was a Spanish cultural historian, philologist, and literary critic who challenged some of the prevailing notions of Spanish identity, raising heated controversy with his conclusions that Spaniards didn't become the distinct group they are today until after the Islamic...
published La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense y su sentido histórico (The linguistic peculiarity of River Plate Spanish and its historical significance). For writers of this viewpoint, the drift away from educated Castilian language was an unmistakable sign of social decay. Castro declared that the peculiarities of Argentine Spanish, especially the voseo
Voseo
Voseo is the use of the second person singular pronoun vos in many dialects of Spanish. In dialects that have it, it is used either instead of tú, or alongside it....
, were symptoms of "universal plebeianism", "base instincts", "inner discontent, [and] resentment upon thinking about submitting to any moderately arduous rule". According to Castro's diagnosis, the strong identity of the Buenos Aires dialect was due to the general acceptance of popular forms at the expense of educated ones. Castro worries above all about the impossibility of immediately perceiving the social class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
of the speaker from the traits of his speech. The lack of the "checks and inhibitions" that the upper classes should represent seemed to him an unmistakable sign of social decay.
Castro's text is typical of a widespread view that sees the unity of language as the guardian of national unity, and the upper classes as the guardians of language orthodoxy. Much of Menéndez Pidal's work is aimed at pursuing that goal, recommending greater zeal in the persecution of "incorrect" usage through "the teaching of grammar, doctrinal studies, dictionaries, the dissemination of good models, [and] commentary on the classical authors, or, unconsciously, through the effective example that is propagated through social interaction and literary creation". This kind of classist centralism—common to other colonial languages, especially French—has had lasting influence on the use and teaching of the language. Only recently have some regional varieties (such as voseo
Voseo
Voseo is the use of the second person singular pronoun vos in many dialects of Spanish. In dialects that have it, it is used either instead of tú, or alongside it....
in Argentina) become part of formal education and of the literary language—the latter, thanks largely to the literary naturalism
Naturalism (literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
of the mid-20th century.
Present-day issues
The question of standard language took on new relevance with the rise of the mass mediaMass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, when, for the first time, speakers of different dialects gained immediate access—by radio, television, and, more recently, the Internet—to language from regions speaking a variety different from their own. The weakness of the standard form's influence on spoken language had made standardization a marginal issue in the past, but it now became an important subject for debate.
The lasting influence of linguistic centralism has led some commentators to claim that the problem of fragmentation is non-existent, and that it is enough simply to emulate educated language. One author, for example, repeated the doctrine of Menéndez Pidal when stating that
In any event, in the sphere of spoken language the issue has become problematic since at least the 1950s, when the commercial demands on movie dubbing
Dubbing (filmmaking)
Dubbing is the post-production process of recording and replacing voices on a motion picture or television soundtrack subsequent to the original shooting. The term most commonly refers to the substitution of the voices of the actors shown on the screen by those of different performers, who may be...
studios working with Hollywood
Cinema of the United States
The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...
films began to call for the development of a Spanish whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical features would not be recognizable as belonging to any particular country. This goal soon proved to be an elusive one: even if the results could, on occasion, approximate a universally intelligible form, at the same time the process prevented the transmission of a familiar, intimate, or everyday tone. Nevertheless, its continued use has produced a degree of familiarization with a certain abstract phonetics throughout Spanish America. Dubbings for use in Spain, on the other hand, are virtually always made in that country, using European varieties of Spanish.
At the First International Congress of the Spanish Language, held in 1997 in Zacatecas
Zacatecas, Zacatecas
Zacatecas is a city and municipality in Mexico and the capital of the state of Zacatecas. It is located in the north central part of the country. The city had its start as a Spanish mining camp in the mid 16th century. Prior to this, the area's rich deposits in silver and other minerals were known...
, Mexico, controversy emerged around the concept of Standard Spanish. Some authors, such as the Spanish writer José Antonio Millán, advocated defining a "common Spanish", composed of the lowest common denominator of most dialects. Others, such as the journalist Fermín Bocos (director of Radio Exterior de España
Radio Exterior de España
Radio Exterior de España is a Spanish international radio station operated by Radio Nacional de España. The station is primarily intended for Spaniards living abroad. It broadcasts 24-hours a day on short-wave radio, satellite and the Internet. Transmissions are in Spanish, French, Arabic, Ladino,...
), denied the existence of a problem, adhering to the traditionalist idea of the superiority of educated Castilian Spanish
Castilian Spanish
Castilian Spanish is a term related to the Spanish language, but its exact meaning can vary even in that language. In English Castilian Spanish usually refers to the variety of European Spanish spoken in north and central Spain or as the language standard for radio and TV speakers...
over influences from other languages. Finally, experts from the Americas such as Lila Petrella stated that a neutral Spanish language could possibly be developed for use in purely descriptive texts, but that the major variations among dialects with regard to semantics and pragmatics would imply that it is impossible to define a single standard variety that would have the same linguistic value for all Spanish-speakers. Above all, certain grammatical structures are impossible to form in a neutral way, due to differences in the verb conjugations used (e.g. the use of the second-person familiar pronoun vos
Voseo
Voseo is the use of the second person singular pronoun vos in many dialects of Spanish. In dialects that have it, it is used either instead of tú, or alongside it....
in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Central American countries, while most other countries prefer tú, and some Colombians tend to use usted in the informal context—and all three pronouns require different verb conjugations). At least one of the three versions will always sound odd in any given Spanish-speaking country.
Given that a neutral Spanish for all Spanish-speakers is impossible, there are four established standardized "Spanishes" used in translations and, more recently, in film-dubbing by some companies: (1) Castilian
Castilian Spanish
Castilian Spanish is a term related to the Spanish language, but its exact meaning can vary even in that language. In English Castilian Spanish usually refers to the variety of European Spanish spoken in north and central Spain or as the language standard for radio and TV speakers...
or Peninsular Spanish for Spain; (2) River Plate Spanish
Rioplatense Spanish
Rioplatense Spanish or River Plate Spanish is a dialectal variant of the Spanish language spoken mainly in the areas in and around the Río de la Plata basin of Argentina and Uruguay, and also in Rio Grande do Sul, although features of the dialect are shared with the varieties of Spanish spoken...
for Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina (using voseo
Voseo
Voseo is the use of the second person singular pronoun vos in many dialects of Spanish. In dialects that have it, it is used either instead of tú, or alongside it....
); (3) Mexican Spanish
Mexican Spanish
Mexican Spanish is a version of the Spanish language, as spoken in Mexico and in various places of Canada and the United States of America, where there are communities of Mexican origin....
for Mexico and Central America (even though the latter is largely voseante
Voseo
Voseo is the use of the second person singular pronoun vos in many dialects of Spanish. In dialects that have it, it is used either instead of tú, or alongside it....
); and (4) another version for the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.
In the television market, Latin America is considered as one territory for distribution and syndication of programmes; for this reason they are dubbed into a Neutral Spanish that avoids idioms and words that may have a coarse meaning in any of the countries in which the programme will be shown. This Latin American Neutral Spanish:
- uses only ustedes for the second person pluralGrammatical personGrammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
pronounPronounIn linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
, regardless whether familiar or formal (in contrast to the use of vosotros for the familiar in Spain); - uses tú for the familiar second person singular pronoun (rather than vosVoseoVoseo is the use of the second person singular pronoun vos in many dialects of Spanish. In dialects that have it, it is used either instead of tú, or alongside it....
); - Tends to a single pronunciation of the s, c (before e or i) and z.
Latin American Neutral Spanish was also formerly distributed with programmes in Spain, but that no longer happens.
Another motivator for the unification of Spanish is the translation by multinational companies of manuals, software, websites, etc. from English to Spanish. It is easier to use a neutral version of Spanish than to create different versions for each country or region. If it were done by country, there would be over twenty versions, and if by region it would be difficult to define which countries belonged to which region, as well as being complicated from the logistical point of view. The result has been to identify a neutral Spanish, a version that tries to avoid regional phenomena such as the Latin American voseo
Voseo
Voseo is the use of the second person singular pronoun vos in many dialects of Spanish. In dialects that have it, it is used either instead of tú, or alongside it....
, or terms that may be identified with specific countries (for example, for 'computer', the term in Spain is ordenador, while in Spanish America the most frequent term is computadora, except in a few areas that prefer computador; and as a result, Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
uses the region-neutral term equipo). This neutral language is developed with the help of glossaries that prescribe the preferred terms and the terms to avoid. It is a common occurrence in the computing field, because it lowers production costs.