ABSTRACT
Unamuno’s retirement speech of 1934, delivered on his seventieth birthday, was devoted to the subject of language and to his lifelong dedication to philology, ‘amor de la palabra, del nombre’, as he defined it. Towards the end of his speech, alluding to himself in the third person, he said: ‘este hombre, a quien se le ha supuesto tan versátil, ha seguido, en su profesión académica, como en la popular, una línea seguida’; and he immediately referred to his passion for words with an exclamation: ‘¡Siempre el filólogo!’ (IX, 1126). Language is indeed a recurring theme in all of Unamuno’s work and encroaches into his sorties in other areas such as history, politics, religion, and of course literature.
