José del Valle

A political history of Spanish : the making of a language

Spanish is spoken as a first language by almost 400 million people in approximately 60 countries, and has been the subject of numerous political processes and debates since it began to spread globally from Iberia in the thirteenth century. A Political History of Spanish brings together a team of experts to analyze the metalinguistic origins of Spanish and evaluate it as a discursively constructed artefact; that is to say, as a language which contains traces of the society in which it is produced, and of the discursive traditions that are often involved and invoked in its creation. This is a comprehensive and provocative new work which takes a fresh look at Spanish from specific political and historical perspectives, combining the traditional chronological organization of linguistic history and spatial categories such as Iberia, Latin America and the US, whilst simultaneously identifying the limits of these organizational principles.

Lo político del lenguaje y los límites de la política lingüística panhispánica

In this article, we present glottopolitical studies and the models through which this subdiscipline articulates language and politics.From a glottopolitical perspective, we analyze the panhispanic language policy through a corpus of texts that includes the paratextual elements of the principal linguistic works produced by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. The analysis shows that these policies and discourse are ideologically anchored in the conceptual structure of liberal democracy. Finally, using Chantal Mouffe’s critique of post-political thought, we contrast the academies’ linguistic regime with two episodes in which members of RAE and ASALE engaged in polemics with other institutions. This comparison allows us to conclude by exposing the limitations of RAE and ASALE’s discourses of selflegitimization.

LENGUAS, NACIONES Y MULTINACIONALES:LAS POLÍTICAS DE PROMOCIÓN DEL ESPAÑOL EN BRASIL*

Este artigo descreve as politicas espanholas para promover o status do espanhol como uma lingua valiosa, com especial atencao a sua promocao no Brasil. Salienta-se a conexao entre essas politicas linguisticas e os interesses geoestrategicos da Espanha, e analisam-se algumas das falhas nos argumentos que legitimam o valor do espanhol.