Table of Contents
Introduction: The “Miracle” of a General Language
It has always struck me, like all of you listening, that much has been written about American dialects, about the different forms of expression, fundamentally highlighting the phonetic and lexical aspects of the differences. But since joining the Royal Academy, I noticed that another aspect of the study of the language in America was hardly developed at all: simply, how the miracle was achieved that a nation so far away—ten thousand kilometers in the best of cases—managed to displace all the indigenous languages and impose its own as the general language.
The Starting Point: Discovery, Claims, and the Papal Bulls
This is a phenomenon that, to be studied, must start from the very fact of discovery, because that is really when the essential policies begin to take shape.
Columbus arrived in America, as did all conquerors to distant lands at that time, thinking they would occupy the land, that they would get rich quickly, that they would participate in riches that, in principle, corresponded only to the monarchs who had granted them the license to discover. The effect of discovery in the legislation of that time was that ownership of the land was acquired by the very act of discovery, and also the possibility of occupying and subjecting the inhabitants to slavery, as long as they were heretics. If they were pagans, the regime was different.
Well, Columbus probably arrived in America with the belief that he could take possession of those lands, exploit them, and profit actively, because the Capitulations of Santa Fe allowed him to do so, in an incomprehensibly generous way on the part of the Catholic Monarchs...
But the regime of that discovery changed when Columbus arrived, first in Portugal and later at the Spanish court, and told of what he had discovered. [Portugal] argued that based on the bulls that the Popes had granted to Portugal in the mid-15th century, the discovered lands were within the zone reserved for Portugal, and therefore the discovered lands belonged to them.
[The Portuguese] prepared to reclaim them, sending their own ambassadors to the Spanish court. The Catholic Monarchs did the same, always declaring that what was discovered was, of course, within the areas that could belong to Spain or areas not reserved for Portugal. One of the immediate actions of the monarchs was to send representatives to the pontifical court, to Rome, to obtain a specific concession from the Pope, which they did, in effect, in several bulls, the most important of all being the Bula Inter Caetera of 1493.
That bull changed the conception of Spain's position in America and also conditioned all kinds of policies that would be developed from then on, especially linguistic policies.
The Core Conflict: Evangelization vs. Colonization
Because what the bull said, simply, is that the discovered lands belonged to Spain, but with the sole title of being a papal donation. And the donation was granted with conditions. The main condition was that the donation would serve to evangelize those peoples in the Christian faith.
This implies a separation of civil power from then on, in favor of ecclesiastical power. Pope Alexander VI was thinking of ecclesiastical power, but more so of the mendicant orders that arrived in America, starting with the arrival of the Dominicans in Hispaniola in 1510. Well, they arrive in massive waves to take charge of that task of evangelization.
Is evangelization or colonization the priority? Is civil power or ecclesiastical power ahead? This is a struggle that develops from then on between the mendicant orders, in charge of preaching, and the civil power, which is fundamentally interested in the power of the colonizers, who are interested in counting on Indian labor and using it for all kinds of work that needed to be done.
This conflict—is civil power or ecclesiastical power ahead?—will also determine the application of the linguistic policies that the Crown develops from then on. The Crown is interested in Castilian being taught, but it does so without any conviction, with a more than relative interest, giving instructions to the discoverers that the Castilian language must be taught to the Indians, but it does not do so with much insistence, nor does it program an execution of those policies, which becomes enormously complicated at such a distance.
The friars, for their part, feel that rather than teaching Castilian, which is very difficult for the Indians to learn, it is preferable that they themselves learn the Amerindian languages. And so they do. And that is the reason why grammars and dictionaries and orthographies begin to be prepared, and letters are put to languages that were not then written languages.
A Shift in Policy: From Habsburg Laissez-Faire to Bourbon Centralization
In this dichotomy—teach Spanish or learn Indian languages—[policy] develops during at least the centuries in which the Spanish monarchy is the Austrian monarchy [the Habsburgs]. They are really little concerned with supervising education in America. The kings, from Charles V or Philip II and the entire Austrian monarchy during the 17th century... linguistic policies are not really taken up again until the Bourbons in the 18th century.
The Bourbons... had found, when they checked what the Austrians had done in America, a certain abandonment of the governance of those lands, which were really governed with excessive autonomy and from the point of view of the interests of the criollos (Creoles) themselves, who were beginning to dominate that entire immense territory politically and economically.
The Bourbons decide they must rectify all this, that they must control the territory much more directly, just as they were also doing with Spain since the Decretos de Nueva Planta (New Plant Decrees). The same recentralizing policy is attempted, above all through a fundamental tool, which is the intendentes (intendants), a French invention of the monarch Louis XIV that is transferred to Spain. And the intendant as a recentralizing figure is the same tool, the same instrument, that is also applied in America.
"Reconquer America" is the watchword of the Bourbon times, because control over those viceroyalties had really slipped from their hands. And they don't achieve much, although... that policy is changed for another in which learning Spanish is imposed as mandatory.
But this happens at the end of the 18th century, when the independences of the different American territories are at the gates. And what prevails now is not the Spanish, but the pre-Columbian. Because since the expulsion of the Jesuits, policies had changed, and the criollos' vocation for being sons of Spaniards begins to mutate... to being sons of the natives of America, of the heritage of which they are all also proud.
Independence: A New Policy and the “Failure” of Spanish
So, at the time of independence... Spain leaves America with more than meager results regarding the generalization of Spanish. Of the 14 or 15 million inhabitants that America had then, barely three million actually spoke Spanish.
But succeeding Spain are the individual governments of each of those territories, which establish their own policies. And the first of all: the need for the new republics to have their own language.
They had seen this because almost all the leaders of independence knew French culture well. They had seen it in France. They knew that the first things the French revolutionaries did, starting in 1789, was to eradicate all the particular languages, all the patois, and apply... the French of the court, the French of Paris, the only possible French, the educated French, as the general language in France.
The American independence leaders... knew this well. "What is this about speaking the language of a nation that has oppressed us for so many centuries?"
The Post-Independence Threat: Linguistic Fragmentation
Therefore, they tried to differentiate themselves in some way. In some more belligerent regions, the struggle for their own language even included the idea of implanting one different from Spanish, which, after all, was the language of the colonizing country. But it didn't go that far.
And as Víctor García de la Concha has explained, the idea that the language of some American nations was not exactly the same as the Spanish of Castile—and that by deepening the differences, their own languages could be constituted for each of those nations, just as many languages were constituted in Europe, proper to European nations, starting from Latin when Latin became corrupted—that idea, fortunately, did not prosper.
There were great men, linguists and jurists, who avoided the fragmentation of the language and postulated its unity. This was achieved thanks also to the common texts of the orthographies, grammars, and dictionaries that were made at that time, and to agents as important as Andrés Bello.
The Unsung Heroes of Unity: The Jurists and the Law
...but there was also a contribution, usually unknown, from the jurists of those countries. I recall the old maxim of Lebrija, that "language always accompanies the empire." The Spanish empire was not really accompanied by its language in America, because at the end of its position as a colonizing country, it did not achieve a total expansion.
But later, the sister republics of America did achieve that expansion, and it is largely their work—both the expansion and the fact that unity was maintained.
They achieved [this unity] also by using the tool of legislation. In America, Spanish legislation endures. When one thinks about how an independence is done, how one country separates from another—now that this issue is also fashionable among us—well, it is not possible to replace the legislation at a stroke. It is not possible to invent a new legal system with a single snap of the fingers. It takes a lot of work.
In America, that substitution took almost three-quarters of a century in some countries. Spanish legislation... was still in force and, furthermore, was held in high regard for its value and for the good solutions it provided. The Partidas, the Nueva Recopilación, the Novísima Recopilación—texts from the 13th to the 19th centuries—continued to be applied in America...
Conclusion: The Work of Andrés Bello and the Civil Code
Then came the renewal of the Civil Code... And in the Civil Code, extraordinary jurists and linguists... managed, by using the best language of Castile, the language of the Golden Age, and transposing it into those laws, to teach the recipients of its application what the best possible use of the language was.
Thus, the work of Bello, which is always emphasized for his Grammar for Americans, is no less important as the author of the Civil Code. He was the material author of the drafting of the Chilean Civil Code of 1853, a text that was later extended, copied in many other republics.
This is, more or less, the effort that the book consists of. I won't explain more because then you will probably... feel excused from reading it, and I don't want to do a thing like that.