Disputing authority: language-ideological debates in the Latin American Press in the 1870s

JUAN ANTONIO ENNIS

Murcia

Simposio; Sociolinguistics Symposium 21: Attitudes and Prestige; 2016

Universidad de Murcia

During the 1870s, still new South American states were coming out or going through long internal conflicts, on the eve of a modernization process that would eventually include them in the map of the world market. At the same time, their former colonial master, subsumed in a long lasting crisis, fostered new foreign policies for the management of Spanish as a political and economical device in times of expansion of literacy, daily press and book market. This new policy would be canalized through the appointment of distinguished Latin American scholars and writers as corresponding members of the Spanish Royal Academy (Real Academia Española, from now on RAE), and later through the establishment of American corresponding Academies, aiming at the recovery of a hegemonic role in the cultural market of the old Empire. The implications of such a foreign policy on language are disparate, including not only the attempt to control a symbolical dimension of lettered and daily life with unavoidable political consequences, but also the eventual control over the flow of goods as valuable as influential (books, press, materials for the design of school teaching, etc.). The foundation of the academies, the public policies of the legitimate language and the integration of a pan-Hispanic lettered city thus constitute recurrent issues in the Latin American daily and scholarly press, resulting eventually in language ideological debates that would trace enduring guidelines in the way of approaching the problem of the unity of Spanish and the cultural market in Latin America. One of the key elements in these debates (especially in the case of prominent voices like those of Juan Maria Gutierrez in Argentina and Miguel Antonio Caro in Colombia) is the role played by the various forms of authority on language, as forma publica (the expression belongs to Quintilian) intertwined with the major lines of political dispute and debate. These tensions within what Rama called "lettered city" have neither exclusively nor predominantly to do with specific sound, grammar or even lexical items, but above all with what we should call the ?authority question?. This question concerns the dialectical wrestling between prescriptive traditional norm and modern scientific description (even mostly in a highly mediated way), norm and usage, lettered and popular forms, Peninsular and American Spanish. The language authority question comes hand in hand if not intertwined with central issues in politically intense and more often than not stormy times in the former Spanish Empire: monarchy and republicanism, liberalism and conservatism, religious hegemony and secular organization of the State and above all laws and schools come to the fore together with the above mentioned language ideological debates. In this paper, we shall try to give a brief sketch of this complex research field, giving account not only of the data in their interconnection, but also of the working hypotheses that should lead our further research on this topic.