A Political History of Spanish: The Making of a Language ed. by José Del Valle (review)

Students in the field of Hispanic linguistics are used to thinking about the history of Spanish exclusively or primarily in grammatical terms. By contrast, the 25 contributions included in this volume edited by José del Valle define their object metalinguistically rather than linguistically. In the words of the editor, “Spanish is approached as a discursively constructed political artifact that, as such, contains traces of the society in which it is produced and of the discursive traditions that are involved … in its creation,” as well as endowed with a “performative function in the field in which it is produced” (18). As acknowledged by Del Valle, the volume owes much of its internal structure, chapter topic choices and even language (i.e., English) to the very underlying expectations about the cultural and geopolitical place of Spanish that are the object of this project (19).

A Political History of Spanish: The Making of a Language starts with a lucid review by Del Valle (part 1, chapter 1) of the history of linguistics as a discipline and the concept of “cultural linguistics” as the study of the ideological constructs on language(s) from a critical perspective. After that, the volume is divided into four main sections, all of which focus on the idea of “the making of Spanish” in different geographical contexts: Iberian perspectives (part 2), Latin American and Transatlantic perspectives (part 3), US perspectives (part 4) and Beyond Spain and the Americas (part 5).

Part 2 includes an introduction by Medina, del Valle and Monteagudo, followed by a selection of papers on a variety of linguistic constructions in Spain; Wright focuses on the emergence of the perception of Romance as distinct from Latin in the Middle Ages; Martínez analyzes the construction of Spanish as a national and imperial language in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Woolard provides a sociopolitical reading of the metalinguistic controversy between Bernardo de Alderete and Gregorio López Madera against the background of the Morisco issue in the seventeenth century; Medina explains the foundation of the Real Academia Española (RAE) as an example of the institutionalization of cultural practices brought about by Bourbon absolutism in the early eighteenth century; Villa treats the intimate alliance between the RAE and the central government in the 1840s and 1850s against alternative sources of linguistic authority; and Monteagudo focuses on the linguistic debates about the role of Spanish vs. other languages in the Second Spanish Republic.

Part 3 opens with an introduction by Narvaja de Arnoux and Del Valle. After that, Firbas studies the discourses in colonial Peru promoting linguistic unification with the metropolis as a precondition to cultural and political unification; Narvaja de Arnoux explores the political implications of the writing of grammars in Argentina and Uruguay in the nineteenth century; Cifuentes discusses the political and cultural debates around the creation of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua in 1875; Valdés traces the oscillation between nationalistic and panhis-panic linguistic discourses in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Dominican Republic; Barrios focuses on roughly the same period and analyzes the official construction of non-Spanish-speaking groups in Uruguay as a contradiction to national unity; Toscano and García interpret the creation of the Instituto de Filología at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (1922) as a site of contention among discourses on language, science and nation; and Del Valle explores the ideological underpinnings of the events surrounding the meeting of Spanish language academies in Mexico in 1951.

A panoramic chapter authored by Del Valle and García introduces part 4. In this part of the volume, DuBord connects discourses on the use of Spanish and English in territorial Arizona to the social struggle between Spanish-speaking local elites and the new Anglo establishment; Fernández-Gibert analyzes similar coetaneous tensions in New Mexico; Martínez interprets the instrumentalization of Spanish as a language with public usefulness in...