Standard Spanish

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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 moulds dictated by a linguistic overseeing authority, but also a form of language that conforms the literary canon and cultural tradition. All aspects of this standard variety, from grammar and prosody to phonetics and lexicon, are therefore removed, to some degree, from everyday common usage.

[edit] Introduction

Standard Spanish is not simply the "absence of idioms and regional mannerisms", that is, the lowest common denominator of all varieties of Spanish, it is a different lect on its own, that has some absent tenses that are not to be found in other linguistic varieties; for example, certain verbal tenses (e.g. the future perfect tense) have virtually disappeared from the normal 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 Standard Spanish is frequently a socially important requirement to correctly perform some prestigious professions and activities, such as liberal arts, teaching or media.

[edit] Origins

Historically, Standard Spanish has been more attached to Castilian Spanish, fixed in its moment at the court of Alfonso VI, than to any other variant. This sociolinguistic preference draws back to the subsequent political organization of the Reconquista, in which the Kingdom of Castile was the central force of the political movement that led to the formation of modern Spain. The origin of the members of the court's nobility was at the base for the first standardization of the language, the grammar manual, Gramática de la lengua castellana, published in 1492 by Antonio de Nebrija. The use of this grammar in the teaching of the language at the American colonies maintained the prestige of the Castilian dialect although, because Andalusian linguistic variant was the most common variant among the colonizers,^[1] the New World Spanish rapidly adopted several aspects typical of it.

[edit] The old colonies and the RAE

Even if some dialects of Castile preserve their character as the canonical model in the peninsula up until today, giving birth to the curious phenomenon that the Spanish spoken in Madrid is less "prestigious" than that of the Valladolid^[2], in America it quickly lost its influence over the spoken language. Even in the administratives centers of Lima and Mexico the phonetics and the grammar of the American dialects were modified in an often perceptible manner. Nonetheless the situation was very different for the written language, where variations are less. Among these causes, the peculiarities of the written register and the academic predominium of the peninsular universities and the centralization of the administrative and legal language in the metropolitan authority are frequently cited.

In 1713, with the foundation of the Real Academia Española, the normalization of the language was part of its explicit purpose of "to fix the voices and words of the Castilian language with most propriety, elegance and purity"^[3]. All along that century it would elaborate ways of standardization, with the publication between 1726 and 1793 of a Dictionary of the Castilian language, in which it is explained the true sense of the words, its nature and quality, with the phrases and causes of talking, the proverbs or sayings and other things convenient to the use of the language^[4], in 1741 of a Orthography of the Spanish language^[5] and in 1771 of a Grammar of the Spanish language^[6]. The language of the colonies would be recorded in dictionaries as "americanisms", mostly after the 19th century.

[edit] Cultural colonialism

During the 1880s, a new political situation and the intellectual independence of the old colonies drove the Real Academia Española to propose the formation of branch academies in them. The project counted with some opposition among the local intellectuals -for example, in Argentina that of Juan Antonio Argerich, that suspecting an attempt of cultural restoration argued in favor of an independent academy and not one that will only be "an office, vassal of the Spanish imperialism", or that of Juan María Gutiérrez, that rejected the naming of a correspondent, but was finally accepted, eventually giving birth to the Association of Spanish Language Academies.

The zeal with which they insisted in the conservation of a "common language" (based, obviously, in the speech of the upper peninsular classes, and not in the powerful influence of the American and other European languages, as the Italian, the Portuguese or the English, had had in the American lexicon and grammars) continued all along the 20th century. A 1918 letter addressed by Ramón Menéndez Pidal to the American Association of Teachers of Spanish, with occasion to their first publication of his magazine, suggested:

The teaching of the language must tend to give wide knowledge of literary Spanish, considered as a high collection; and in an accessory manner it must explain the light variations that are offered in the educated speech in Spain and in Hispanic-America, making apparent the essential unity of all within the literary pattern (...) in the concrete case of the teaching of Spanish to foreigners, I don't think there's doubt to impose the pronunciation of the Castilian regions.

—Letter of 1918, to the American Association of Teachers of Spanish

The priority of the written language over the oral and the peninsular over the American was the central thesis of this document; the "barbaric character of the American indigenous languages" forbade, in his opinion, that these would have any influence over the American Spanish. The tutorship of the Academy would do the rest. With that he was trying to counteract the prevision made by Andrés Bello in the prologue to his Grammar of 1847, which feared the profusion of regional varieties that "flooded and clouded much of what is written in America, and altering the structure of the language, tends to make it in a multitude of irregular, licencious, barbarian dialects"; for this conception, undoubtfully linguistic and political, 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 the diagnostic of Bello of the eventual fragmentarion of Spanish in a plurality of languages mutually unintelligible languages, although celebrating it, warned against the use of the written language to measure the unity of it, considering it a "veil that covers the local speech".

This problem was documented in a particularly incisive manner in the 1935 treaty of Amado Alonso, titled The problem of the language in America^[7], and was reiterated in 1941, when the scholar Américo Castro published The Argentinian language problem ^[8]. For the authors of this current, the linguistic derivations with respect to the Castilian educated form was an unmistakable sign of social degradation. Castro expressly manifests that the peculiarities of the Rioplatense Spanish, especially the voseo, are symptoms of "universal plebeianism", "lower instinct", "intimate discontent, roughing of the soul when thinking to summit to any fairly ardous norm". In his diagnosis, the source of identity of the rioplantese variety was due to the general acceptance of the popular forms with the decline of the educated ones, and worries above all about the impossibility to perceive immediately the social class of the speaker from the traits of his speech, the lack of the "brakes and inhibitions" that the upper classes must represent seemed to him an unmistakable sign of social degradation.

The text of Castro is the archetype of an extended conception, which makes the unity of the language the custody of national unity, and of the upper classes the keeper of the orthodoxy of it. A good part of Menéndez Pidal's work would be oriented to seek that objective, recommending the increase in severity of persecution of the uses considered incorrect through "the teaching of the grammar, the doctrinal studies, the dictionaries, the difusion of the good models, the commentary on the classical authors, or either unconsciously, through the effective example that is spread on the social interactions of the literary creations". This manner of classist centralism, common to other colonial languages, especially French, has had lasting influence in the use and the teachings of the language, only recently some linguistic varieties have become part of the official scholarly teaching (as the voseo in Argentina) and of the literary language, which was a powerful advance for the naturalism of the middle of the 20th century.

[edit] Currently

The question of the standard language gathered new relevance with the diffusion of the mass media, when, for the first time, it was immediately accessible, for the native speakers of different dialects, television, radio emissions and, more recently, electronic material coming from regions in which a different variety is used. The lesser importance of the standard form in the oral speech have made of this, a marginal question in other times, an important theme to debate.

The lasting influence of the linguistic centralism has taken some authors to assert that the problem is non-existent and that it is enough to refer to the educated language. Gastón Carrillo Herrera, for example, repeated the doctrine of Menéndez Pidal when stating that "[i]t may be possibe that one or several media, in a certain moment, represent a reason of concern because of the employment of the popular or vulgar forms. (...) [T]he social needs and the cultural obligations (...) demand from its personnel a greater culture, in which it is comprised an elevation in the speech to the most educated forms. Therefore they, will also be, each time with graeter clarity, powerful forces that impulse the elevation of the language and its unification."

Nevertheless, in the oral sphere the question has become problematic since at least the 1950s, when the commercial demands imposed to the dubbing studios neighboring the United States included the elaboration of a Spanish whose accent and lexical-grammatical characteristics were not recognizable as belonging to any country. Such task revealed itself to be chimeric: even if the linguistic form could, in occasions, get closer to a universally intelligible one, at the same time it prevented that the familiar tones, intimate or daily ones, to be transmitted. Several authors have pointed out the effect of the unreality or distancing by this formula. Although its lasting use has produced a certain degree of familiarization with that abstract phonetics all along Latin America; the dubbings for the Spanish market, on the other hand, are made invariabily in Spain, using varieties of European Spanish. Although not all the movies played in Spanish theaters have had this characteristic, as some Walt Disney films (Robin Hood 1973 and several ones before). This is because there are ways to dub or get movies known by the majority of the Spanish-speakers in the Castilian Spanish; contrary for example to what happens with the Tuscan-Italian and the different Italian dialects.

At the First International Congress of the Spanish Language (I Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española), held in 1997 in Zacatecas, Mexico, controversy emerged around the concept of Standard Spanish. Some authors, such as José Antonio Millán, advocated the definition of a "common Spanish" composed of the lowest common denominator of most dialects; others, such as the director of Radio Exterior de España, Fermín Bocos, denied the existence of a problem, adhering to the traditionalist idea of superiority of educated Castilian Spanish over influences from other languages. Finally, American experts such as Lila Petrella stated that a neutral Spanish language could possibly be elaborated for use in purely descriptive texts; however, the strong variations between dialects in pragmatic and semantic aspects imply that it is impossible to define a single standard variety that would have the same linguistic value for all Spanish speakers. Most of all, it is impossible to form certain grammatical structures in a neutral way due to differences in verb conjugations used (e.g., in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Central American countries, "you" [singular] translates to vos, most other countries prefer tú, while some Colombians tend to use the formal alternative usted -- all three pronouns require different verb conjugations). At least one of the three versions will always sound very uncommon in any given Spanish speaking country.

Because some are conscious that a neutral Spanish for all Spanish speakers is impossible, there are four established standardized Spanish, in some traductions and, more recently, in dubbing by some companies: the Iberian (or European) Spanish for Spain (Castilian Spanish); the Rioplatense Spanish for Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina which uses vos; Mexican Spanish for Mexico and Central America, even though the latter is practically voseante; and another version for the rest of 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 'ustedes' instead of 'vosotros' for the 2nd person plural pronoun.
• Uses 'tú' (2nd person singular) is used to determine the relationship among the interacting people, using 'usted' for relationships in which a higher respect is necessary.
• Tends to a sole homogeneous pronunciation of the s, c (before e and i) and z.

The Latin American Neutral Spanish was also distributed in Spain but nowadays it happens no longer.

Curiously another engine for the unification of Spanish arises from the great multinationals by adapting the text of its manuals, software, websites, etc., in English to produce texts and software destined to the world market. In these cases it is more useful to produce a neutral version of Spanish that to deal with the creation different versions to each country or region; because if it's done by country, there should be up to twenty-something versions, and if by region it is difficult to define which countries belong to which one, and it is also complicated from the logistics point of view. The result is that normally what has been called in terms of locating a "Neutral Spanish". A version that tries to avoid terms that may be identified with specific countries ("ordenador" is most used in Spain while "computadora" in turn is used in America) or linguistic regional phenomena (the Latin American voseo) that is elaborated with the help of glossaries that prescribe the preferred terms and the terms to avoid. It is a very interesting phenomenon and very common in the computing field, because the result lowers the production costs, and contributes to the unification of the Spanish.

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

• Alonso, Amado (1935), El problema de la lengua en América, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
• Bentivegna, Diego (1999), Amado Alonso y Américo Castro en Buenos Aires : entre la alteridad y el equilibrio, en Narvaja de Arnoux, E. y Bein, R. Prácticas y representaciones del lenguaje, Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1999. pp. 135-156
• Borges, Jorge Luis (1974), Obras Completas, Buenos Aires: Emecé.
• Castro, Américo (1941), La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense y su sentido histórico, Buenos Aires: Losada
• del Valle, José. (1999): «Lenguas Imaginadas: Menéndez Pidal, la Lingüística Hispánica y la Configuración del Estándar» en Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 76, N° 2. pp. 215-233. ISSN: 1139-8756
• Krashen, Stephen (1998b): «Language shyness and heritage language development.», en In Krashen, S., Tse, L. y McQuillan, J. (eds.), Heritage language development. Culver City, CA: Language Education Associates, 1998b. pp. 41-50
• VV. AA. (1998), Actas del Primer Congreso Internacional de la lengua española, México DF: Siglo XXI.