СОВРЕМЕННЫЙ ИСПАНОЯЗЫЧНЫЙ СОЦИУМ: ПОИСК ЕДИНОГО ЯЗЫКОВОГО СТАНДАРТА

Introduction

 Nowadays, the growing influence of the media in the political, social and economic spheres and the emergence of the global information space give rise to language standardization tendencies in global language communities, including Spanish. The ultimate goal is to create the language continuum to ensure comfortable communication in everyday situations, to promote mutual understanding and respect, thus improving the general well-being of the language community in question.

Method

The article uses diachronic and contextual analysis and the descriptive method, which allowed the author to compile the data on the emergence of the Standard Spanish concept and the Standard Spanish interrelationship with the pluricentric language norms. In agreement with the widely accepted views, the language standard is defined as an eclectic form of language which serves certain communicative goals, with its users feeling comfortable and unconstrained.

Discussion

The topical issue of Standard Spanish is, first of all, reflected in terminology one can find in the scholarly publications on the subject. The synonymous terms as «el español internacional», «el español panhispánico», «el español global», «el español neutro», «el español estándar», «el español total» used by Spanish-speaking scholars (Clyne, 1992; Perissinotto, 2005; Moreno Fernández, 2007; Bravo García, 2008; Andión Herrero, 2008; Fajardo Aguirre, 2011; Marimón Llorca, 2015, Paffey, 2008, 2012; Narvaja de Arnoux, 2010, 2015; Zimmermann, 2014; del Valle, 2015; Rizzo, 2016, 2017) manifest their attempts to reflect on the unification of the Spanish language norms across the whole Spanish-speaking area. This will presuppose the universal use, in the media especially, of the Pan-Hispanic Language Standard  [2]. Nevertheless, it is a widely recognized fact that Standard Spanish is a commercial project supported by transnational IT and media corporations. Some linguists warn that the resulting form of Spanish can not be a natural language in the proper sense of the word, the only purpose it could serve is information exchange within the international Spanish-speaking community [7]. The international form of Spanish may be for the Spanish-speaking peoples to maintain their identity, but these very peoples run the risk of isolation [7].

Results

Language standardization is a vital problem for the Spanish-speaking area, with its 20 countries where Spanish has the status of official language. The first steps to this goal were taken 20 years ago, at the First International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE) in 1997, where the language of the media was discussed. The Congress has become a forum to debate on language policies of Spanish-speaking countries and the role of Spanish in the world; at the same time the Congress is an authority to determine the current language policy.

The Congress convenes once in three years and it has become a global event. The Congress conventions are to enhance the role of Spanish in the world and in the Spanish-speaking community. Since 1997, the following topical issues have been discussed: “Spanish and the media”, “Spanish in information society”, “Language identity and globalization”, “Present and future of Spanish”, “Unity in variety”, “America in Spanish language”, “Spanish in books: from Atlantic to Pacific”, “Spanish and creativity” (Zacatecas, 1997: “La lengua y los medios de comunicación”; Valladolid, 2001: “El idioma español en la sociedad de la información”; Rosario, 2004: “Identidad lingüística y globalización”; Cartagena De Indias, 2007: “Presente y futuro de la lengua española: unidad en la diversidad”; Valparaíso, 2010: “América en lengua española”; Panamá, 2013: “El español en el libro: del Atlántico al Mar del Sur”; Puerto Rico, 2016: “Lengua española y creatividad”).

 The leading role in implementing the Congress resolutions belongs to the Spanish and Latin American media, whose discourse potential is essential for spreading knowledge and popularizing views and ideology.

The first two conventions of the Congress (1997, Zacatecas, and 2001, Valladolid) focused on the norms of Spanish, standardization of spelling, grammar and lexis, in the media, first of all, due to their wide influence in the vast Spanish-speaking area.

Actually, it is the media that proclaimed the standardization of the Spanish language of the press, the radio and television the issue of the day, they were the first to raise the question of global Spanish (español global/español internacional). In 2004 they initiated the Pan-Hispanic Language Ideology and Identity project, which united two major institutions – academia, the prescriptive authority, on the one hand, and the Spanish and American media groups and news agencies, using the language as a vehicle, on the other.

The main issue in the linguistic circles debating on the norms and standardization was the definition of the norm itself; after years of debates they came to an agreement on the subject. The norm is understood as a set of language preferences in a particular language community that is accepted as standard usage. Geographically, Spanish is one of the most widely spread languages, thus  it is pluricentric in the sense that it has regional norms which are all based on the literary language (la expresión culta formal), the standard form (el español estándar), used in formal situations and in education institutions. This standard form of Spanish influences the Pan-Hispanic Language Standard which contributes to mutual understanding and unity within the global Spanish-speaking community (Andión Herrero, 2008, Clyne, 1992, Perissinotto, 2005, Moreno Fernández, 2007, Fajardo Aguirre, 2011).

In 1999 a new version of Spanish language orthography, Ortografía de la lengua Española, received the approval form the Spanish language Academies of all the Spanish-speaking countries, after they had studied the book in detail and presented their reviews. Thus, the book became the first pan-Hispanic work. It contains the unified spelling rules, gives recommendations as to the spelling of geographical names and loanwords, some cases of word stress were also disambiguated.

The latest 2010 edition of Ortografía de la lengua Española became an updated and more comprehensive version of the previous work, with the principles more substantiated than in the 1999 edition. As pan-Hispanic in its underlying philosophy as the previous work, the 2010 Orthography differs from it in its prescriptive tendency, giving more rigid rules for the cases where some variation was allowed before. The main differences of the 2010 work from the 1999 edition: firstly, it gives a comprehensive view of Spanish language orthography, not only its controversial aspects; secondly, the spelling rules are substantiated, not merely prescribed; thirdly, the history of Spanish orthography in the book explains the distinctive features of the spelling system and their evolution; fourthly, some new information has been added on the words written separately or joined together and the spelling of loanwords and foreign proper names.

It is remarkable that 1999 saw the publication of another scholarly work, the Descriptive Grammar of the Spanish Language (Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española) that became the most detailed treatise on the syntax and morphology of Spanish, with all the regional and dialect variations included. The work contains a comprehensive list of references on all subjects considered. The book is a collective work of 73 authors from Spain and Latin America, with V. Demonte and I. Bosque, from the Royal Spanish Academy, editing it. They were inspired by the scholarly works on Italian, English and Dutch grammar, thus addressing the lack of a similar comprehensive description of the Spanish language.

The goal of the authors of the 1999 Descriptive Grammar was to give answers to questions about particular language phenomena, such as why certain types of verbs take certain complements or why the meaning of an adjective depends on its position in a sentence. Thus, the 1999 Descriptive Grammar was the first to demonstrate the true-to-life usage of Spanish and its elements and structural models functioning in various communication situations.

The 2004 Congress in Rosario adopted a document on a new pan-Hispanic language policy (“La Nueva política lingüística panhispánica”). The document proclaimed the main goal to be not opposition to the dominating English language, but searching for unity within the Spanish-speaking community, taking into account its diversity and the lack of guiding principles for norm selection in the media.

The convention in Rosario initiated the process of building pan-Hispanic linguistic identity when, in an attempt to overcome the language variants regional linking, they proposed the idea of a form of Spanish free from its cultural and national constraints. Alberto Gómez Font, Style Editor at the Agencia EFE (Madrid), coauthor and editor of the style guide of The National Association of Hispanic Journalists, a professor of language and a renowned linguist, made a proposal for unification of the language norms taking into account the diversity of non-standard usage. The idea took off, and another pan-Hispanic-oriented work, the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts (Diccionario panhispánico de dudas), was published in 2005. The dictionary was to be the basis for a unified Spanish language style guide (Libro del estilo). Not only the academia and the media welcomed the dictionary, it had been long awaited by educators, business people and government officials as well.

Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (DPD) includes over 7000 entries, giving clear answers to the most controversial questions about the Spanish usage, such as phonetics and orthography (pronunciation, stress, punctuation and spelling), morphology (the gender and number problems, conjugation forms, etc.), syntax (government and agreement problems, etc.) and semantics (lexical meaning, loanwords and loan translations, neologisms, spelling of proper names).

The dictionary promotes the idea of the leading role of native speakers of Spanish in determining the criteria for the correct usage of the language; thus, the language norm is the result of consensus (RAE и ASALE 2005: XI).

The DPD was followed by a number of pan-Hispanic works (obras panhispánicas) published by the Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española, RAE) and the Association of Spanish Language Academies (Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, ASALE): the Dictionary of Americanisms (Diccionario de americanismos, 2010), the New Grammar of the Spanish Language (Nueva gramática de la lengua española, 2009-2011), the new version of the previously published Orthography (Ortografía del español actual, 2010) and the 23d edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (DRAE, 2014). Nevertheless, in spite of the widely accepted idea of standardization and unification underlying these works, the proclaimed pan-Hispanic philosophy does not seem uniformly reflected in all of them.

The New Grammar of the Spanish Language is based on a more lenient understanding of the language norm than it used to be in the earlier works. The academic authors of the New Grammar recognized the difficulty of fine-balancing the descriptive and prescriptive approaches and full-heartedly preferred the former. Thus the aim was a description of grammatical models shared by all the Spanish language variants (el español general), as well as an exhaustive recording of the phonetic/ phonological, morphological and syntactic variants within the regional language norms, even if they deviated from the variants largely preferred by the other regional Spanish-speaking communities. In the course of the work the diatopic and diastratic aspects, as well as the usage correlation with various communicative situations were taken into account.

Another goal of the authors of the New Grammar was recording the colloquial variants beyond the regional language norms within the Spanish-speaking area, if such colloquialisms were used in writing and were valuable as features of language structure. This approach is to allow any language user to answer the question of what usage is within the norm and what is not. The concept of the language norm as such is not totally rejected, but the system of the Spanish language is presented as a set of different norms where the actual usage correlates with the geographical area and a particular communicative situation.

It would be difficult if not absolutely impossible to find a more detailed vision of language norm. The New Grammar description of language phenomena is based on a detailed taxonomy of both criteria and language variants, taking into account dialect usage, the levels of the language hierarchy, the register, a communicative situation, the general language, and written and spoken language differences, thus documenting the current Spanish usage as a whole. The telling name given to the New Grammar in the media is the total Spanish Grammar (la gramática del español total).

The preface to the New Grammar proclaims adapting the academic work to the understanding of the general public to be the best way to make the book popular (RAE и ASALE 2010a: XLVI). The 2013 version of the New Grammar, Good Use of the Spanish Language (El buen uso del español), is adapted to be used by non-linguists, giving clear answers in short and simple form, with numerous examples. In an article informing of the publication (La Real Academia se echa a la calle), the Spanish paper «El País» highlighted the democratic tendency of the current language standardization approach.

All the above-mentioned sources of linguistic data are available online and free. The two decades since the 1997 Congress have also seen numerous other works on Spanish language, such as 10 language corpora and 8 regional Spanish dictionaries.

Conclusion

The current situation in the global Spanish-speaking community, where Spanish mentality area does not align with the country borders, has the political, geographical and cognitive aspects that have emerged historically and, thus, are the objective reality. All the local Spanish-speaking communities realize there are two opposite tendencies – on the one hand, there is opposition to levelling out language differences, on the other, there is movement to join the efforts to preserve the unity within the domain of the Spanish language and culture. The latter corresponds to the economic and geopolitical interests of the states that fully realize that language influence is the matter of prestige and economic benefits. In the sphere of education Spanish is popular as a foreign language; academically, Spanish, with its vast resources, has a great potential as vehicle of communication in the sphere of scientific and scholarly research. Being socially prestigious, Spanish is extending its reach into cultural domains of other languages.

At the moment the idea of Standard Spanish, with its linguistic, social and political aspects, is being discussed in various academic circles, such as Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española (CILE) and Coloquio Internacional (Ideologías Lingüísticas en la prensa escrita), as well as in scholarly publications exploring current problems of the Spanish-speaking area, such as pan-Hispanic language policy (la política lingüística panhispánica), pan-Hispanic language ideology (la ideología lingüística panhispánica), glottopolitics (la glotopolítica) and linguistic identity (las identidades lingüísticas).