The Story of Spanish by Jean-Benoît Nadeau, and Julie Barlow (review)

These Canadian authors, one a native speaker of French and the other of English, earlier published popular titles on The Story of French (2006) and the witty Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (2003). The allure of an even larger audience–considerably more than sixty million–and a six-month Fulbright fellowship in Phoenix, Arizona for co-author and spouse Barlow provided the impetus to create an easy-to-read introduction to Spanish as well. Given the lack of a popular language history that might introduce a wide range of readers to international castellano (gallego, catalán, vascuense barely make an appearance, and for these authors Spanish means Castilian in all cases), this effort is commendable and could provide a valuable teaching tool at once accessible and lighthearted. This is not a historical grammar and no serious attention is given to phonology, morphology, syntax or grammar. The extensive coverage of lexicon is amusingly anecdotal, and dialectology is reduced to pockets of slang like those associated with Madrid’s post-Franco Movida (294-296).

This is a social history of Spanish speakers, rather than a history of the language itself. The authors, who seem unaware of the difference between a living language and its writing system, attend to statistics and linguistics but aspire to “biographical” and sociological approaches. The former especially leads to personifications of language that sometimes overreach: “Spanish is a cluster of contradictions. Over its history, it became–at once–one of the most organized and systematic tongues in history and a finely honed tool used to express disorder and passion” (2); and “What is making Spanish so influential in the United States … lies in the language’s quirky, vibrant and accessible pop culture” (6).

There are other assertions that pile up errors: “There are about a dozen churches throughout Spain that have characteristic Gothic horseshoe-style arches” (29). Even in a chapter about Visigoths, a reference to “Gothic” architecture is apt to be misunderstood, and there are plenty of sacred and secular buildings in Iberia with horseshoe arches, a style further popularized by Moorish builders, but already well known in Syrian Christian models as in the Beatus manuscripts. This iconic signature element, now a cliché of exotic Spain, helped brand Visigothic legacy and legitimacy, and eventually nostalgia for it. Over time, variations on those arches became a normalized vernacular “Spanish” feature, as María Rosa Menocal and her co-authors ably documented in The Arts of Intimacy (76-94).

The book struggles in several areas starting with a historical scope that is decidedly patchy. The first 11 of 33 chapters survey Iberia up to Nebrija, promising enough and granting a star turn to Alfonso X (“The Prince of Language Buffs”). Rather embarrassingly, the chapter on the Cantar de mio Cid derived too much of its historical knowledge from the 1961 movie with Sophia Loren and Charlton Heston and apparently its title from yet another movie (“The Kings’ Speech”). Unfortunately much of Spain’s Golden Age gets skipped except for issues of indigenous language contact in the New World and some of the processes of Castilian’s ultimate hegemony everywhere in Latin America. Chapter 19 on “The Secret Lives of Language Academies” offers a pivot to all the remaining chapters on Spanish in the United States and the re-emergence of the language as an international literary force coming out of Iberia (“The Spanish Renaissance”, “The Franco Years”), and Latin America, especially Mexico (“The Latin Rage”, “Learning Curve”) and Argentina (“The Secret Agent of the Boom”).

There are a number of plain mistakes in the book which makes one suspect that no well-informed native speaker was enlisted as a reader for the manuscript. There are persistent stumbles, from the early announcement that “There are a lot fewer sounds in Spanish than in English” (xi), to errors on specific word meanings (merced is not ‘market’, xiii...