¿Qué hace una lengua como el español en una Academia como ésta? La institucionalización del atraso en la lingüística española

Abstract

This paper tries to find the origin of the ideology behind the official Spanish philology. It also tries to determine how this ideology has caused not only the lack of development in linguistics but also its historiographic distortion. To this end, the authoritarian roots of hispanic studies are analyzed to identify their influence on Spanish philology. Within this context, the normative obsession of the Real Academia Española (RAE), a reflection of the institution's imposing tradition, is revised. The institutionalization of the RAE's normative approach has hampered the development of theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, terminological standardisation in Spanish and teaching Spanish as a first language. Likewise, the complicity of the Spanish universities is denounced. Their coward silence acts as an instrument of the institutional anachronism and consolidates the lack of development in linguistics. Finally, the official distortion of historiography is analyzed. This distortion has been based upon the policy of silence and exclusion exerted on outstanding pioneers of Spanish linguistics such as Eduardo Benot, Ángel Amor Ruibal and María Moliner, among others. They have remained unseen under the grammatical and lexicographic mediocrity of the RAE and its followers.