History of Spanish and its Grammar
The word “grammar” refers both to the rules that govern language production and comprehension and to the study of those rules. As the set of rules and principles governing the use of language, grammar is as old as the oldest of languages!
As the study of the rules, it has a long history. The oldest grammar studies come from ancient India, centuries before our common era, and deal with the rules of the Sanskrit language. The most recognized Sanskrit grammarian was Panini, whose ideas about grammar are still used today! In Europe, grammar emerged as a discipline in Greece, with authors like Aristarchus of Samothrace, who baptized it “the art of letters.” In Ancient Rome, Latin grammar was developed based on Greek ideas, and became a pillar of the the art of eloquence, with rhetoric and dialectics (taught alongside the art of numbers).
The Birth of Spanish
Throughout the Middle Ages, various factors contributed to the birth of Romance languages, including Spanish. Among these factors, the strict grammatical prescriptions of classical Latin drove a wedge between the language of scholars and the vulgar or popular Latin spoken by uneducated people. Also, the new geopolitical conditions of a fragmented empire furthered a linguistic fracture that gradually gave rise to heterogeneous (region-specific), although interrelated, vernacular languages.
In Spain, a variety of Romance languages coexisted for centuries, including Galician, Castilian, Leonese, Catalan, and Asturian. At the end of the XI century, a process of linguistic reunification began thanks to the rise of Spanish as the language for the chansons de geste. These epic poems served as example, inspiration, and entertainment, much as the heroes and stories in today’s Marvel movies. In the second half of the XIII century, during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile and Leon, Spanish acquired official status. The king had all official documents written directly in Castilian or translated into Castilian, rather than having them in Latin, as it had been the custom until then.
The political rise of the new languages inspired the interest to study them in their own right. The Sevillian Antonio de Nebrija was the first scholar of Romance languages to understand the importance of writing down their rules. Thus, in 1492, he published in Salamanca his Gramática de la lengua castellana, which is not only the first book on the grammar of the Spanish language, but also the first book on any Romance language at all. In the prologue to Queen Elizabeth the Catholic, he states:
“When I think to myself, my enlightened queen: […] and I put before my eyes all that has been written for our memory and remembrance, one thing I find and I draw to a certain conclusion: that the [Latin] language was always a companion of the [Roman] empire; such was their association that together they rose, grew, and flourished, and later together they fell […] And because my thought and will have always been to magnify the achievements of our nation, and to give the men of my language books to make the best use of their leisure […], I decided before all other things to lay down the art of our Castilian language. Thereby, what is henceforth written in our language may remain in a style and endure the test of time, as has been done with Greek and Latin, for the study of their art has allowed them, through the many centuries of their existence, to endure in their uniformity.”
(My translation.)
Spanish Sets Sail
It may not escape the reader that that same year of 1492, Christopher Columbus was authorized by the Catholic Monarchs to seek new trade routes to the Indies across the Atlantic. Spain, like many previous kingdoms, sought to expand its power. During this expansion, the discovery and subsequent conquest of a new continent led to the spread of Castilian as a lingua franca.
However, the process of Castilianization was much slower than the geopolitical and religious expansion. This expansion was accelerated by the papal concession of lands to the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal as vicars of the Catholic god. Spain claimed vast territories of the Americas as their own (aided by the Tordesilles Treaty that delineated the claiming rights of Spain and Portugal.) As a result of these territorial claims, the indigenous people already living in the Americas were deemed subjects of the crown: they had to be christened and taxed.
The task of communicating with the natives fell mainly on the missionaries. In their quest to convert the natives to their faith, the missionaries also spoke up for native rights. To a great extent, the missionaries advocated for the use of native languages, and were devoted to developing teaching materials, such as grammars and bilingual glossaries. A famous sermon given before Christmas in 1511 by Antonio de Montesinos, exhorts:
“Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves? How can you lie in such lethargic slumber? Rest assured that in your present state, you can no more be saved than the Moors or the Turks who have no want or fear for the faith of Jesus Christ.”
(My translation.)
Montesino’s sermon ignited a fierce debate over native rights and identity, and led Spaniards to initially adopt bilingualism for economic and religious gain. They had the help of an invaluable group of native speakers of aboriginal languages, who were often the product of slavery or miscegenation and became interpreters by necessity.
However, communicating amidst the linguistic diversity of the New World’s native languages proved quite difficult. The scarce number of Castilian-speakers and the difficulties of the terrain added to the diversity of native languages led the missionaries to favor Nahuatl over other languages. In 1570, to overcome the problems that linguistic variety posed while “respecting” the right to a native language, King Philip II decreed Nahuatl as the official language of the Viceroyalty of New Spain — officially created in 1535. This imposition proved unsustainable, as it was a foreign language for both the Spaniards and many of the native peoples.
In 1696, King Charles II established Spanish as the only official language of the Viceroyalty. In this way, Spanish became the first modern European language to be massively taught as a second language. Bilingualism persisted in the home, while Spanish quickly spread to all aspects of public and political life.
Spanish in the Americas
The Spanish of the criollos, native Spanish-speakers born in America, was, by the end of the seventeenth century, its own version of peninsular Spanish. This Creole Spanish had developed on the basis of southern Andalusian phonetics, with seseo (lack of distinction between /s/ and /th/) and the fall of the final consonants (as in /usté/ instead of /usted/); the inclusion of indigenous words, such as maíz (corn), maní (peanut), huracán (hurricane) and chocolate; and the Sevillian syntax, which incorporated the use of ustedes (informal plural for you) to the detriment of vosotros (formal plural for you.)
Faced with a new transcontinental linguistic reality, the Real Academia Española was founded in 1713, “to cultivate and solidify in any possible way the purity and elegance of the Castilian language” through the creation of a dictionary, “the most copious that could be created”.
For more than a century, American Spanish had a submissive place to Peninsular Spanish until 1847. That year, the Venezuelan scholar Andrés Bello wrote his Grammar of the Castilian Language Intended for the Use of Americans. Understanding that “each language has its genius, its physiognomy, its twists”, Bello took on the task of describing based on observations the innovative identity of American Spanish.
“I did not want […] to rely on authorities, because for me the only unimpeachable language is language itself. […] The prodigious advancement of all science and art, the spread of intellectual culture, and the political revolutions of our time call every day for new signs that express new ideas.”
(My translation.)
Bello’s intention was not to “write for the Castilians,” meaning European Spaniards, but rather to bring together in language all of the young American nations where SPanish was spoken. This goal was faithful to Nebrija’s ideal of avoiding linguistic fragmentation (especially in syntax), considered a sign of cultural and political weakening. In the Prologue to his Grammar, he explained his animosity towards changes in syntax:
“[…]the greatest of all evils, and the one that, if it unchecked, will deny us of the priceless advantages of a common language, is that of new structures. It already floods and muddies much of what is written in America. Liberties of construction alter the structure of the language, turning it into a multitude of irregular, licentious, and barbarian dialects. As embryos of future languages, the belabored transformations of these language-lings would replicate in America the dark era of the corruption of Latin in Europe. Chile, Peru, Buenos Aires, and Mexico would each speak their own language, or rather, several languages, as happens in Spain, Italy, and France.”
(My translation.)
In pursuit of the unity of language and, more specifically, of the homogenization of syntax, Bello used as his model the Spanish of “educated people.” These were speakers who, because they had had access to formal education, shared a mutually comprehensible language even when they lived in very distant regions. He shared this rationale in the preface to his Grammar:
“This use is preferred because it is the most uniform in the various provinces and towns that speak the same language, and therefore the one that makes what is said easier and more often understood. In contrast, the words and phrases of uneducated people vary greatly from one town and province to another, and are not easily understood outside that narrow environment in which they were born.”
(My translation.)
In the late 19th century, awareness about American Spanish led to the creation of national language academies in the New World. The first one to be founded was the Colombian Language Academy in 1871. Today, there are 22 national academies: in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Spain, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela. These 22 academies collaborate in the Association of Spanish Language Academies (ASALE), which was founded in 1951 at the behest of the then President of Mexico, Miguel Alemán Valdés, in order to work towards the unity of language as cultural heritage.
Pan Hispanic Spanish
At the beginning of the 21st century, almost a century after the last grammar published by the Royal Academy in 1931, ASALE brought together scholars from all over the Spanish-speaking world to create the first consensual pan-Hispanic grammar. More than a hundred scholars collaborated in the new grammar with the aim of describing the grammatical constructions typical of Spanish in general, while giving an account of the phonological, morphological, and syntactic variants from different areas. In 2009, the new grammar of the Spanish language, Nueva gramática de la lengua española, was officially launched under the slogan “the grammar that makes us”. The work has three volumes, one on morphology, one on syntax, and one on phonetics and phonology, as well as a DVD of voices of Spanish for educational purposes, gathering the diversity of the language “from the mouths of speakers in all linguistic areas”.
According to a recent study based on data collected from Twitter messages, it can still be said that three large Spanish-speaking regions endure, reflecting patterns of colonial settlement that developed differences specific to each region. The Iberian Peninsula is the original region, the Central American Caribbean region, along with Mexico and Peru, make up the second region, and finally, the Southern Cone is the third region. To these, we should perhaps add today the United States as the youngest region, a melting pot of Spanish dialects where speakers from the three previous regions converge.
Spanish Around the World
Did you know that Spanish is one of the most spoken languages in the world? With about 580 million speakers, it is only second to Mandarin Chinese as mother tongue (and Mandarin Chinese might be better defined as a set of mutually intelligible dialects). English is the most spoken language as a second language. Spanish is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations and one of the most studied as a foreign language.
Spanish is the official language in 20 countries in the Americas, one in Europe and two in Africa, by declaration or adoption in governmental institutions, as in the case of Argentina. More than 400 million native Spanish-speakers live in the Americas, from Argentina and Chile to Canada and the United States. The US, it bears mentioning, with some 55 million Spanish speakers, has become the second Spanish-speaking country in the world, after Mexico, despite Spanish not being an official Spanish language.
Spanish is also the official language in the African nations of Equatorial Guinea and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and is spoken in Cameroon, Nigeria, Gabon, Morocco, Angola, Turkey, Israel, Philippines, Brazil, and several islands in Oceania.
References
Bello, Andrés. (1847) Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos. Digital Edition of Obras completas. Tomo Cuarto, 3rd ed. Caracas: La Casa de Bello. 1995. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/andres_bello/obra-visor-din/gramatica-gramatica-de-la-lengua-castellana-destinada-al-uso-de-los-americanos–0/html/ff6ef310-82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_44.html. Consulted on 2/27/16.
Bravo, Eva. (2015) “Rasgos de procedencia andaluza en la variedad americana”. Español de América. http://www.xn--espaoldeamerica-1qb.com/rasgos-de-procedencia-andaluza-en-la-variedad-americana/. Consulted on 2/27/16.
Cifuentes, Bárbara. (1998) Letras sobre voces: multilingüismo a través de la historia. México: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social e Instituto Nacional Indigenista.
De Nebrija, Antonio. (1492) Gramática de la lengua castellana. http://www.filos.unam.mx/LICENCIATURA/Pagina_FyF_2004/ introduccion/Gramatica_Nebrija.pdf. Consulted on 5/3/16.
Estatutos de la Real Academia Española. (1715) Estatutos_1715.pdf. http://www.rae.es/la-institucion/organizacion/estatutos. Consulted on 7/3/16.
Frago Gracia, Jose Antonio. (1999) Historia del español de América. Madrid: Gredos.
Gonçalves, Bruno and SÁNCHEZ, David. “Crowdsourcing Dialect Characterization through Twitter”. PlosONE. 19 de noviembre de 2014. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0112074. Consulted on 5/3/16.
Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana and Hugo Lopez, Mark. “Spanish is the most spoken non‑English language in U.S. homes, even among non-Hispanics.” August 13, 2013. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/13/spanish-is-the-most-spoken-non-english-language-in-u-s-homes-even-among-non-hispanics/. Consulted on 10/3/16.
Languages. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. https://www.cia.gov/Library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2098.html. S.f. Consulted on 10/2/16.
Marimón Llorca, Carmen. “El español en América: de la conquista a la Época Colonial”. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/el-espaol-en-amrica-de-la-conquista-a-la-poca-colonial-0/html/00f4b922-82b2-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_2.html. Consulted on 2/14/16.
Kramer, Samuel Noah. (1988). History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (3rd ed.)
