ABSTRACT
In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 we have mainly been addressing features of the standard, written language. As we saw in Chapter 1, this is what many people understand by ‘the Spanish language’; but the existence of an agreed written standard is not an essential feature of language: human languages are primarily means of oral communication and writing is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. Indeed, we might put it even more strongly and say that a standard language is an artifice, the result of sometimes arbitrary decisions by language planners which are then imposed on the speech-community, through education and official usage, often with the political motive of centralisation (though there are also practical communicative advantages in an agreed standard). Standardisation may be a more or less conscious process. We saw in Chapter 1 how in the Spanish-speaking world this is achieved through the RAE today. However, even before this, in the 13th century a degree of standardisation was achieved in early written Castilian through the Royal Scriptorium usage known as ‘castellano drecho’ which developed under the aegis of Alfonso X, and from the late 15th century onwards humanist interest in the vernacular meant that there was an increasing concern with linguistic conformity. For Spanish speakers of the 21st century, a tradition of standardisation is therefore well established and taken for granted. But, as it happens, Spain in recent years has given us some interesting insights into rather more sudden processes of standardisation as a result of the encouragement of languages other than Castilian, which it is worth pausing briefly to examine.
