Standard Spanish - Present-day Issues

Present-day Issues

The question of standard language took on new relevance with the rise of the mass media, when, for the first time, speakers of different dialects gained immediate access—by radio, television, and, more recently, the Internet—to language from regions speaking a variety different from their own. The weakness of the standard form's influence on spoken language had made standardization a marginal issue in the past, but it now became an important subject for debate.

The lasting influence of linguistic centralism has led some commentators to claim that the problem of fragmentation is non-existent, and that it is enough simply to emulate educated language. One author, for example, repeated the doctrine of Menéndez Pidal when stating that

t is possible that one or several of mass media, at a particular moment, may give cause for concern because of their use of vernacular forms. rom moment to moment, society's needs and the cultural obligations appropriate to these media demand from a higher level of culture, which includes raising speech to the most educated forms. Therefore they also will be, with greater and greater clarity, a strong force for the raising of the language and for its unification.

In any event, in the sphere of spoken language the issue has become problematic since at least the 1950s, when the commercial demands on movie dubbing studios working with Hollywood films began to call for the development of a Spanish whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical features would not be recognizable as belonging to any particular country. This goal soon proved to be an elusive one: even if the results could, on occasion, approximate a universally intelligible form, at the same time the process prevented the transmission of a familiar, intimate, or everyday tone. Nevertheless, its continued use has produced a degree of familiarization with a certain abstract phonetics throughout Spanish America. Dubbings for use in Spain, on the other hand, are virtually always made in that country, using European varieties of Spanish.

At the First International Congress of the Spanish Language, held in 1997 in Zacatecas, Mexico, controversy emerged around the concept of Standard Spanish. Some authors, such as the Spanish writer José Antonio Millán, advocated defining a "common Spanish", composed of the lowest common denominator of most dialects. Others, such as the journalist Fermín Bocos (director of Radio Exterior de España), denied the existence of a problem, adhering to the traditionalist idea of the superiority of educated Castilian Spanish over influences from other languages. Finally, experts from the Americas such as Lila Petrella stated that a neutral Spanish language could possibly be developed for use in purely descriptive texts, but that the major variations among dialects with regard to semantics and pragmatics would imply that it is impossible to define a single standard variety that would have the same linguistic value for all Spanish-speakers. Above all, certain grammatical structures are impossible to form in a neutral way, due to differences in the verb conjugations used (e.g. the use of the second-person familiar pronoun vos in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Central American countries, while most other countries prefer tú, and some Colombians tend to use usted in the informal context—and all three pronouns require different verb conjugations). At least one of the three versions will always sound odd in any given Spanish-speaking country.

Given that a neutral Spanish for all Spanish-speakers is impossible, there are four established standardized "Spanishes" used in translations and, more recently, in film-dubbing by some companies: (1) Castilian or Peninsular Spanish for Spain; (2) River Plate Spanish for Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina (using voseo); (3) Mexican Spanish for the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America (even though this region is largely voseante), and the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America); (4) the Spanish of international organisations like the United Nations, the Organisation of American States and their respective specialised bodies. Naturally UN Spanish differs from OAS Spanish, because Spain is not a full member of the latter organisation, and thus its influence is weak. But Spain was refused membership in the UN when it was founded in 1945, since Spain was a Fascist dictatorship. Although it remained a Fascist dictatorship, it was eventually admitted in 1956. However by then UN Spanish had been already established by Spanish-American diplomats and translators.

In the television market, Latin America is considered as one territory for distribution and syndication of programmes; for this reason they are dubbed into a Neutral Spanish that avoids idioms and words that may have a coarse meaning in any of the countries in which the programme will be shown. This Latin American Neutral Spanish:

• uses only ustedes for the second person plural pronoun, regardless whether familiar or formal (in contrast to the use of vosotros for the familiar in Spain);
• uses tú for the familiar second person singular pronoun (rather than vos);
• Tends to a single pronunciation of the s, c (before e or i) and z.

Latin American Neutral Spanish tends to be common in Colombia (because of the existence of a lot of regional dialects), Venezuela (because of its location as a crossroad for Latin America and an important Spanish-language soap opera production industry) and Mexico, where most of mass media is made.

Latin American Neutral Spanish was also formerly distributed with programmes in Spain, but that no longer happens.

Another motivator for the unification of Spanish is the translation by multinational companies of manuals, software, websites, etc., from English to Spanish. It is easier to use a neutral version of Spanish than to create different versions for each country or region. If it were done by country, there would be over twenty versions, and if by region it would be difficult to define which countries belonged to which region, as well as being complicated from the logistical point of view. The result has been to identify a neutral Spanish, a version that tries to avoid regional phenomena, such as the Latin American voseo, or terms that may be identified with specific countries (for example, for “computer”, the term in Spain is ordenador, while in Spanish America the most frequent term is computadora, except in a few areas that prefer computador; as a result, Microsoft Windows uses the region-neutral term equipo). This neutral language is developed with the help of glossaries that prescribe the preferred terms and the terms to avoid. It is a common occurrence in the computing field, because it lowers production costs.