ABSTRACT
We will point out some aspects of linguistic diversity in the Kingdom of Spain. In addition to Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Occitan, Aragonese, and Asturian are all spoken there as well as Berber and Arabic in the North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Out of all of those, only Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician and Occitan enjoy any kind of complete or partial official status, in the territories in which they are spoken, and in addition have normativizing academies: the Real Academia Española (RAE), the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) and the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (AVL), Euskaltzaindia, the Real Academia Galega (RAG) and the Institut d’Estudis Aranesi-Acadèmia Aranesa dera Lengua Occitana (IEA-AALO). Although neither Aragonese nor Asturian enjoy any official status, they also have regulatory institutions: the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana (ALLA) and the recently approved Academia Aragonesa de la Lengua.
Normative institutions have proven to be an essential tool for codifying and ennobling these languages and to provide them with the instruments necessary for their survival. Whether or not that will be sufficient has yet to be seen. The reality is that Spanish is already, or is about to be, the language of more than 50 % of the population in each of the territories which have their own language. The situation has evolved from producing dictionaries oriented toward learning Spanish starting from one’s own language to using Spanish as the starting point from which to reinforce one’s ever more precarious knowledge of one’s own language.
We will occupy ourselves, principally but not exclusively, with aspects of the bilingual lexicography between Spanish and Catalan, Basque, and Galician throughout history and in the present day. We will analyze, as contrast dictionaries with Spanish, two of the Spanish-Catalan pair, two Spanish-Basque and one Spanish-Galician. We will also introduce some tools for consulting earlier repertoires with lexicographic interest; the majority of these are bilingual dictionaries, and thus we have thought it important to consider them.
Lastly, we will present some digitized text corpora that are available in these languages and that directly or indirectly will make up the foundation for creating the next generation of bilingual dictionaries.
