Carla Amorós Negre - Rosario Llorente Pinto - Emilio Prieto de los Mozos
University of Salamanca, Spain

The Spanish language in the media: A pan-Hispanic approach to the linguistic models of the press

Keywords: neutral Spanish, pan-Hispanic Spanish, standard, media.

It is well known that media are key to setting and establishing language rules, especially those related to the standard varieties. As a matter of fact, there are many linguists who identify the standards of languages with the specific varieties of the formal areas of use, which require sample uses and which are spread out by the media, the administration and the education system. In this regard, it is important to bear in mind that the specific field of the standard is the communicative distance and, thus, the standard varieties are essentially used in written discourses closer to transactional strategies than to interactional ones: informational and scientific texts, academic writings, editorials and non-literary opinion columns in the media.

The industrialization and the appearance of the mass media encouraged a change of direction in the configuration of the standards: they tended to look for a greater and stronger convergence in written varieties and in the subsequent oral linguistic models. It has been this way, indeed, in the Hispanic domain, in which media look for a further rapprochement of the speakers by adopting endoglosic linguistic models or by a convergence of the varieties in a spirit of neutrality as it can be appreciated in the so-called neutral Spanish.

Therefore, this paper attempts to provide the essential features of the Spanish variety used in the different prototypical transactional media from the panhispanic scope. In addition, it is argued that the neutral Spanish, which resorts to phonetic, lexical and grammatical features that hinder the national or regional localization of the speakers, is clearly different from the so-called panhispanic Spanish, which is the model suggested by the Spanish Language Academies. Furthermore, it is also different from the concept of standard, which meets more demanding criteria since it is closely linked to expressions of the written language.