El protagonismo de la Cuba decimonónica en la lexicografía regional del español

Abstract

The recent discovery of the manuscript of the Diccionario de provincialismos de la isla de Cuba (1831), written jointly by a group of Cuban lexicographers, brings forward by five years the date of appearance of the first exempt vocabulary of Spanish referring exclusively to an American region, since the Diccionario provincial de voces cubanas (1836, with several reeditions) by Esteban Pichardo y Tapia has been displaced from the top of the podium by that work. Both include the term provincialism in their titles. One of the objectives of our proposal is to know the context that justifies the use of this label. On the other hand, in both cases we find ourselves before repertoires full of lexical units that refer to specific realities, originally or typically American, since they have no equivalent in the normative model used at the time by the Spanish of the metropolis. We will try to exemplify this abundance through the lexicon referring to gastronomy and demonstrate how this type of units were invented as a result of the application of the differential criterion, which is the dominant one our language's regional lexicography.