Fase Inicial

As Del Valle anticipated in the previous chapter, in contrast with traditional histories of Spanish that begin with an overview of the pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula, our project opens the historical arch at the time when Spanish seems to have emerged as an object of discourse. Our decision – not an unproblematic one – is grounded in Roger Wright’s theory and is, therefore, only as valid as the theory turns out to be.¹In any case, we choose to take Wright’s work as a reference point not because of its implications for dating the “birth” of Spanish (ultimately, a matter of relative, if not superficial, importance) but because of his particular take on the historical emergence of languages. In this view, a new language appears not necessarily as a result of linguistic evolution, not only as the development of new linguistic forms, but rather as the product of a new conceptualization of speech. The birth of a language is, as it were, less a linguistic than a metalinguistic matter.

Beginning the historical narrative that underpins this book in the period when the conceptual split between Latin and Romance must have taken place seems like a reasonable methodological move. On one hand, it forces us to take into consideration a context defined by the conquest and colonization of Visigoth Hispania by Muslim armies and settlers of mostly Arabic and Berber origin. It also invites us to consider the relevance of Jews in medieval Hispano-Christian and Hispano-Muslim societies. Finally, it leads us to revisit the various processes through which Hispano-Christian kingdoms subdued and conquered their southern Hispano-Muslim neighbors, especially after the twelfth century.

In such contexts, the politics of the various forms of Arabic-Hebrew-Latin-Romance multilingualism become central.

InChapter 1, Del Valle suggested that, among the many virtues of Ram´on Men´endez Pidal’s masterpiece Or´ıgenes del espa˜nol[The origins of Spanish], first published in 1926, we can count his unequivocally contextual approach to the relationship between Latin and Romance. While he did engage in the

1 Wright advanced his theory in his groundbreaking book of 1982 and succinctly presents it in the next chapter of this volume. See also Wright 1996 for a collection of articles both supportive and critical of his proposals.

23

description of the language at different stages of its evolution, his most lasting contribution was the commitment to render his study truly relevant to history.

The idealist theory of language in which Or´ıgenes was grounded (seeChapter 1) led Pidal to examine scribal practices in a context of socially significant linguistic variation and to link linguistic processes to the realm of the Law,

“Reconquest” politics and identity-building.

The political relevance of language and its manifestation in metalinguistic practices become particularly salient in the thirteenth century, as Wright argues in the next chapter. It is a period of unprecedented southward expansion by the Christian kingdoms in which the political interests of each alternately coalesce (e.g. the definitive union of Le´on and Castile under Ferdinand III in 1230) and clash (e.g. the well-known friction between Ferdinand’s son Alfonse X and his Portuguese and Aragonese neighbors). It is also a phase in which education and access to the written word spread to social groups from which it had been traditionally kept at a distance (Lleal1990: 206–7). Translation, metalinguistic practice par excellence, and the emergence of linguistic regimes concerned with the establishment of norms of correctness for the “new” Romance languages reveal themselves in this period as practices closely connected with state power and proto-national affirmation. Toledo’s notorious Escuela de Traductores and Alfonse X’s search for a form of correct Castilian, castellano drecho, stand out as examples of this inalienable glottopolitical link.

By the fifteenth century, while the northern Ibero-Romance linguistic map remained a continuum, distinct varieties associated with politically bound terri-tories had been crystallizing through institutionalized writing practices and the slow but steady consolidation of literary traditions. They had become culturally recognizable languages. During the Renaissance, the discourse of grammari-ans progressively moved away from the scholastic speculation of the Middle Ages towards a more pedagogically oriented approach to classical languages and a descriptively inspired codification of vernaculars (Percival1995). The latter became not only vehicles for the transmission of knowledge – although Latin would still stand strong for a few centuries – but also instruments of communication and objects of discourse deeply entangled with the politics of colonization, national pride and social exclusion (as Firbas, Miguel Mart´ınez and Woolard show in this volume).

The dynastic union between Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon is a central turning point in Iberian history since the unification of these two kingdoms under one crown can be constructed as the onset of a process that would result in the emergence of modern Spain. The fact that the annus mirabilis of 1492 and the multiple historical developments that it came to symbolize are located in the middle of their reign justifies the useful centrality of this period in narratives of Spanish history and even in historical narratives produced from a broader Iberian perspective. The conquest of Granada and the expulsion of

Hispanic Jews are materially and symbolically linked to policies of collective identity that, as Woolard reminds us in this volume, progressively moved, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from religion to culture and, finally, to limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). Similarly, Columbus’s arrival in the Americas is directly linked to imperial politics that spread the power of Castile across the Atlantic, across the Pyrenees and, even closer to the imperial center, across the loosely defined borders that had separated the Iberian medieval kingdoms. In this regard, the 1581 invasion of Portugal by the Duque of Alba is particularly salient as it opened a phase identified as the Iberian Union, in which Portugal, Castile and Aragon were under one single crown worn successively by Philip II, III, IV and, finally, Charles IV, during whose reign, in 1668, Portugal would regain full independence.

Our history of Spanish as an object of discourse for the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries unfolds, therefore, in a complex network of tensions with other Iberian languages such as Arabic, Catalan and Portuguese (see Miguel Mart´ınez and Woolard in this volume), other European languages such as French, German and Italian (see Miguel Mart´ınez in this volume) and an overwhelming American linguistic landscape that will only be corralled, if at all, through numerous and inevitably violent epistemological operations (see Firbas in this volume). In other words, representations of language in this period must be interpreted in the context of national/imperial as well as Iberian/transatlantic politics and cultural flows. The metalinguistic dis-courses unveiled in this part demand an interpretive framework in which, in contrast with the traditional “monumental narrative of global expansion for the Spanish language” (Miguel Mart´ınez in this volume), the symbolic requirements of nation and empire coexist with the strategic pragmatism of sociolinguistic actors in determining the usage, status and development of Spanish.

The eighteenth century and the War of Succession (1701–1714) brought with them a new glottopolitical scenario that led to the creation of Spain’s language academy, Real Academia Espa˜nola (RAE). While traditional views of the emer-gence of the RAE have placed it within the context of Enlightenment linguistic thought and identified it as a natural step in a natural process of linguistic standardization (e.g. Lapesa1980: 418–21), it seems productive to broaden the scope and look at the institutionalization of language as a development that unfolds within specific political conditions (Medina in this volume).

Shortly after his arrival in Spain and still immersed in the war, Philip V enacted a series of laws that redefined the distribution of power in the country.

The support that Catalonia, Aragon and other regions had given to his enemies was punished with a series of measures that extensively curtailed the autonomy traditionally guaranteed by regional laws or Fueros. However, the Nueva Planta decrees also revealed a new centralist understanding of the administration

of political authority modeled after French absolutism (which the king had assimilated in his grandfather’s court).

In this context, language – Spanish in the case at hand – became a privi-leged tool in the systematic centralization of power. If local administrations were going to work under the direct control of Madrid, an effective vehicle of communication was to be designed and implemented. Thus, a legal discourse on language was deployed in order to organize the sociolinguistic field through proscriptive indictments and prescriptive principles. A 1716 decree, for exam-ple, required that all the cases to be heard in Barcelona’s Royal Court should be written and conducted in Spanish. A year later, the magistrates and local authorities were instructed to use Spanish systematically and introduce it as extensively as possible in their areas of influence. Those were only the first in a series of laws and communications focused on the implementation of Spanish, the frequency and reach of which were increased after Charles III was crowned in 1759 (Moreno Fern´andez2005).²

The implementation of Spanish as an effective tool of the new centralist state also required that it be subjected to a careful process of standardization, that is, to another form of metalinguistic practice. Following the example of Italy’s Academia della Crusca and the Acad´emie Franc¸aise, the RAE was founded in 1713 and soon began to publish its principal instruments of standardization: the dictionary (1726–39), the orthography (1741) and the grammar (1771).³These processes are to be conceived within a general trend of growing institutional-ization of power and knowledge as well as of a progressive rationalinstitutional-ization of their circulation and distribution. The effectiveness of royal power depended on a simplification of the networks that allowed the king to have a closer presence and tighter control over all aspects and throughout all geographical confines of government. The creation of cultural institutions such as Sociedades de Amigos del Pa´ıs and the RAE allowed for the coordinated and unified circulation of knowledge, where intellectual trends followed lines of distribution analogous to those of the state bureaucracy.

These institutions became, in a way, new technologies of governmental-ity that contributed to the production of precise “mappings” and descrip-tions of the object over which power was to be exerted.⁴ If, for example, the

2 Also, in 1768, it was decided that Spanish – instead of Latin – was to be the only medium of instruction in schools, and in 1770 it was decreed that only Spanish should be spoken in America – thus ending the strategic use of indigenous languages that had been systematic after the Council of Trent. The use of Catalan would be further prohibited in the church (specifically in Mallorca in 1778) and even in the theater (where all languages but Castilian were banned in 1799).

3 The interest in that process of codification was not limited to the Academy and, in the same period, numerous intellectuals like Mayans, Juan de Vald´es, Fray Mart´ın Sarmiento and Benito de San Pedro contributed to the same cause with their own works.

4 On governmentality we choose the following statement by Foucault: “If we take the question of power, of political power, situating it in the more general question of governmentality understood

implementation of new tax policies required catastros and planimetr´ıas, that is, the meticulous cataloguing of rural and urban properties, the new uses of forms of cultural capital such as language required its detailed description and codification as a threshold for its control and effective use, always within the pyramidal conception of absolutist power and enlightened despotism.

All these trends paved the way for a new relationship between language and nation that would emerge after the French Revolution and spread to the rest of Europe: “national language” was now to be conceived as a tool of nation-building through the assumption of a common political conscience.

Belonging to the nation as a political project necessarily meant speaking the shared and common language. It was no longer the absolute monarch who inhabited the core of the centralist project but rather the people themselves, who renounced their particularities in the name of the common good and actively shared a project of political and cultural unity called nation. In Spain (as in Latin America, where nation-building was even more literal in the post-independence context; see Arnoux and Del Valle in Part III), this process gained considerable traction during the second half of the nineteenth century (see Villa in this volume). It entailed, first, securing access to the language – mainly through the educational system – for those who had to be incorporated into the state bureaucracy and to positions within the national economy that required a certain level of linguistic competence. It involved, secondly, the ideological elaboration of Spanish as the legitimate national language.

The process, however, faced resistance in parts of Spain such as Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country where, at different points in the course of the nineteenth century, movements emerged that disputed Spanish’s hegemony through the defense of their respective languages and cultures. At first, these movements had little explicit political content, focused on the literary cultiva-tion of the language and did not quescultiva-tion the status of Spanish as Spain’s only official language in education and government. It was towards the end of the century that these initiatives became associated with political operations that aimed at regional self-government in the context of a decentralized Spanish state. Although this evolution occurred at a different pace in each community,

as a strategic field of power relations in the broadest and not merely political sense of the term, if we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, trans-formability, and reversibility, then I do not think that reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of a subject defined by the relationship of self to self. Although the theory of political power and an institution usually refers to a juridical conception of the subject of right, it seems to be that the analysis of governmentality – that is to say, of power as a set of reversible relationships – must refer to an ethics of the subject defined by the relationship of self to self. Quite simply, this means that in the type of analysis I have been trying to advance for some time you can see that power relations, governmentality, the government of self and of others, and the relationship of self to self constitute a chain, a thread, and I think it is around these notions that we should be able to connect together the question of politics and the question of ethics” (Foucault 2005).

depending, to a great extent, on the speed of modernization and the develop-ment of capitalist forms of economic organization, in all cases the spread of nationalist movements and ideologies went hand in hand with the articulation of linguistic demands and efforts to further cultivate the respective languages.

This tension between different nation-building projects has run through Span-ish’s contemporary political history and has pervaded – until the immigration movements of the late twentieth century triggered new forms of linguistic awareness – public discourse on language in the Spanish Iberian context.⁵The discourse on Spanish is linked to a conflict that revolves around the perma-nently contested structure of the Spanish state and to a constant back and forth of actions, reactions and counter-reactions in which the Spanish nationalism embraced by the state confronts several nationalisms from the periphery. The period known as Restauraci´on (1875–1923) pursued the imposition of Spanish as the national language within a liberal-oligarchic framework that deployed both political and discursive strategies to counter the claims of Basque, Catalan and Galician regionalism and nationalism. The dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera that resulted from a coup d’´etat in 1923 engaged in linguistic nation-alization through authoritarian and openly coercive policies that forcefully displaced the other Iberian languages from public life. The Second Republic (discussed by Monteagudo in his chapter) restored in 1931 a liberal framework in which language-ideological debates inevitably accompanied policy imple-mentation. The 1936 coup inaugurated a new and long period of radical erasure of Basque, Catalan and Galician from public life and iron-fisted affirmation of a centralized organization of the state.⁶In the last quarter of the century, a change in the political system and the approval of the 1978 constitution returned Spain once more to a liberal democratic system in which negotiations on the structure of the state went hand in hand with debates on the relative status of Spain’s languages. Each of these periods – and the language-ideological debates that they engendered – requires, of course, special attention. It seems clear that, while the ideology of linguistic nationalism underpinned most representations of language in the twentieth century, the mappings of this ideology onto Spain’s political configuration have been multiple and diverse.

As stated inChapter 1, the primary focus of this book is not language itself but its relationship to the formation of political conscience. Our interest is not the historical transformation of linguistic features but the way in which those transformations acquire political meaning and socio-symbolic significance. In that sense, the pragmatism and symbolism of language in the different contexts

5 The conspicuous absence of Portuguese in Spain’s discourses on language – with the obvious exception of Galicia – is itself an intriguing fact.

6 The linguistic ideologies of Francoism are also briefly discussed in Castillo Rodr´ıguez’s chapter on Spanish in Equatorial Guinea.

analyzed in this part are inextricable. In Wright’s analysis the convenience of a new system of writing that facilitates reading aloud is put in practice by religious and political institutions in need of spreading out pieces of doctrine or legislation in the most effective manner. That new linguistic tool, Romance, would also become a vehicle of international prestige for an ascending political unit becoming, in a certain way, its easily distinguishable signifier. Language becomes both a tool and a symbol of power.

However, conversely, the ways of power are also the ways of its resistance.

Miguel Mart´ınez’s chapter illuminates the way in which both the Empire and its critics share the pragmatism of using the most effective and wide-reaching tool to disseminate their message, the Castilian language, even if to pursue contradictory goals. In that sense, the tool and the symbol do not necessarily go together anymore. If the role of Castilian in Charles I’s 1536 speech in Rome after his military victory over the Turks or in the edition of Nebrija’s grammar were retroactively “constructed” as crucial symbolic events in the formation of that entity called the “language of the empire,” it is no less true that the very same language was the vehicle chosen to resist the homogenizing practices of that empire by figures such as Antonio de Sousa.

Similarly, the linguistic polemics around the “Sacromonte forgeries” studied by Woolard show how an excluded minority used the language of exclusion as an intended tool of resistance: by claiming that Castilian was being written in

Similarly, the linguistic polemics around the “Sacromonte forgeries” studied by Woolard show how an excluded minority used the language of exclusion as an intended tool of resistance: by claiming that Castilian was being written in