Prof. Dr. Luis Fernando Lara

El Colegio de México

Abstract for a paper at the World Conference on Pluricentric Languages and their non-dominant Varieties, Graz, July 8-11, 2015

“Policentrism, multipolarity and normativity in contemporary Spanish”

It is a well-known fact, that Latin-American Spanish native speakers outnumber in a ratio of 13:1 the Spanish native speakers in Spain. Moreno and Otero (2005) calculate 371 million Spanish native speakers in the world, from which Spaniards are only 41 million. Nevertheless, the number of speakers of Spanish is not a defining variable to understand normative phenomena in the Spanish-speaking world. Spanish is the national language of 21 independent countries; each one of them have created “communication communities” –as defined by Dell Hymes- in terms of  their legal and educational systems and their communication and commerce networks. Therefore, we can consider each country, and specially their capital cities as diffusion centers of language norms and usages.

There are two kinds of linguistic norms (Lara 1976, 2004, 2009): explicit and consequently prescriptive norms, and implicit, consequently tendential norms. This last one appears as the result of communicative practices in each national center and obeys language adaptation necessities of each communication community.

In this sense contemporary Spanish may be characterized by a strong normative dominance of explicit norms imposed by the Spanish Royal Academy and its Latin-American subsidiary language academies, which are daily confronted with different usages and different implicit norms in Latin-America and even in Spanish territories like Andalucía and Canary Islands.

On the other side, each national center of Spanish broadcasts its own usage and its own implicit norms to other countries, due to the different weight of their communication networks, as well as the weight of their “language industries”: educational systems, book market, television and radio networks, etc. These facts have different influences as a result in the Spanish-speaking world: not all national centers weigh equally, and therefore some national centers are -at the same time- differentiated poles of dominance. Consequently, I conclude that Spanish is also a multipolar language.

This contribution to the Conference offers data to prove the aforementioned ideas and try to contribute to the better understanding of phenomena that occur between the dominant variety of language and the non-dominant .

Key words: Spanish, Hispanic America, multipolarity, norms.