Latin America: Portuguese or Spanish?

+   Mon Feb 01, 2010 10:23 am GMT
<<The idea of a hispanic South America is pure delusion.>>


No, it is the opposite. In UNASUR, the South American Union, the people of Surinam, Guyane and Brazil study Spanish, the lingua franca of UNASUR, and also of the Americas.
James   Tue Feb 02, 2010 8:50 am GMT
Portuguese is the best language for Latin America. From Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay to Fernando de Noronha, you will find people speaking Portuguese. Spanish is fast disintegrating into numerous neo-languages.

Spanish = The Titanic (eroding very fast)
Guest_   Tue Feb 02, 2010 8:53 am GMT
<<Spanish is fast disintegrating into numerous neo-languages. >>

All people know that. Even all Hispanic people know that Spanish is suffering a disintegration/fragmentation and erosion, but they're so ashamed to admit it.
Mr. Blanc   Tue Feb 02, 2010 9:48 am GMT
Spanish is in dramatic fragmentation.

The Fragmentation of Spanish

I have discovered an informative new English-language website for anyone interested in the Spanish language. Dealing with the Fragmentation of Danger that Spanish faces, and created by Tulane University quoting from references made by Hispanics, it discusses the threats to the Spanish language and the ineffectiveness of costly and conscientious programs initiated by the Hispanic governments in its misbegotten effort to rescue and promote the language of Cervantes.

How can Third World countries that speak a rather limited toilet Spanish, and that have more urgent economic problems to worry about, save the language? How can schools teach Castilian Spanish if the overwhelming number of students demand FRENCH, ARABIC, RUSSIAN or even PORTUGUESE? Above all, how can Spanish compete with ENGLISH?


LANGUAGE POLICY IN HISPANIC AMERICA

Language policy in Spanish-speaking Latin America deals with challenges to the status of Spanish as the official language, a status inherited from the colonial administration of the New World. These challenges come from several sources: the assertion of the rights of indigenous groups, THE ‘DANGER’ OF FRAGMENTATION OF SPANISH INTO A MULTITUDE OF LOCAL DIALECTS, THE GROWING PRESTIGE OF ENGLISH AND INFLUENCE OF THE UNITED STATES, AND ALONG THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF BRAZIL, CONTACT WITH PORTUGUESE.

In the initial phase of colonization, the Catholic Monarchs and later Charles V required all of their new subjects to learn Spanish, just as their predecessors had imposed the learning of Castilian on the conquered Arab territories in order to bind them more closely together in the nation governed by Castile. However, it soon became clear that the linguistic diversity of the New World was too great to allow for the immediate implantation of Spanish, and some allowance had to be made for the usage of indigenous languages in teaching and evangelization. In 1570 Phillip II reluctantly authorized a policy of bilingualism in which instruction could be imparted in ‘the’ language of each Viceroyalty: Nahautl and in New Spain and Quechua in Peru, with the consequent extension of these two languages into territories where they were not spoken natively. Even this measure was not enough, however, and in 1596 Phillip II recognized the existent multilingualism: Spanish for administration and access to the elite, and a local indigenous language for evangelization and daily communication in indigenous communities. This policy lead to a separation of colonial society into a minority of Spanish/creole Spanish-speakers governing an indigenous majority speaking one of many indigenous languages. The separation became so great that it all but halted the Hispanization of rural areas and created local indigenous elites with considerable autonomy from the central adminstration. A reassertion of central authority commenced in 1770 when Carlos III declared Spanish to be the only language of the Empire and ordered the administrative, judicial and ecclesiastic authorities to extinguish all others. After Independence, the new nations and their successors maintained the offical status of Spanish as a means of strengthening national unity and pursuing modernization through education. This tendency was reinforced at the turn of the century through the 1940’s with notions of Social Darwinism, in which the vigorous hybrid groups of Latin America would eventually overcome the ‘weaker’ indigenous groups. It is only since World War II that this policy has suffered any substantial change.

Several processes converged in the post-War period to shake the linguistic status quo. One is the growth of industrialization, which requires an educated workforce and thus lends urgency to effective education. Another is agrarian reform, which raises the social status of the farmer while increasing his need for vocational training. These two processes create a growing pressure to learn the language of technology and mechanization, Spanish. As a counterpoint to this pressure, there was an understanding among policy makers of the failure of the pre-War incorporationist policies to acheive their goal of Hispanization. The confluence of these tendencies was a shift towards the usage of indigenous languages in primary schools to ease the transition to Spanish. Moreover, the dynamic of questioning the entire model of development grew, a dynamic that was reinforced by the emergence of indigenous activists educated in the new national schools. These contradictions came to a head during the labor and peasant movements of the 1950’s and 60’s, where calls for the preservation of indigenous languages served as a vehicle for the preservation of entire indigenous societies. The subsequent official response to these movements had diverse outcomes throughout Latin America. In Mexico, the new indigenous consciousness continued to grow unabated, as it did among the Bolivian Aymara and Ecuadorian Quechua, and to a lesser extent among the other Quechua speakers of Bolivia and Peru. Elsewhere, many organizations were driven into marginality or outright armed resistence, with the paradoxical result that often the only officially-tolerated supporters of indigenous languages were foreigners: scholars pursuing linguistic or anthropological fieldwork, linguists trained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics for the translation and dissemination of Christian texts, or members of other non-governmental organizations engaged in aid or relief work.

Only recently have indigenous defensors of indigenous languages found any standing on the national stage. This new tolerance has been said to reflect the neo-liberal reforms required as conditions for loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the early 1990’s, with the threat of Communist takeover having receeded. There are now a multitude of protective measures that go from bilingual primary education (Honduras), to constitutional protection (Columbia), to the establishment of indigenous languages as co-official with Spanish (Guatemala).

With respect to the status of Spanish among native speakers, Independence lead to the creation of national educational institutions and a desire to reform Spanish orthography so as to facilitate its learning by American speakers, as well as to foster a literary tradition independent of Spain. Such reforms come to little in the face of the turbulence created by Independence, but a second round of standardization began as part of the modernization process initiated around 1870. Increasing immigration to Latin America and the strengthening of trends towards democratization lead to the fear among the intellectual elite that the linguistic unity of Latin America would collapse into a cacophomy of local variants, much as the Latin of the Roman Empire fragmented into the variety of Romance languages.

The final threat to the official status of Spanish is the growing contact with other European languages: with English throughout Latin America, and with Portuguese along the southern border of Brazil. Contact with English arises through migration to the United States for economic or political reasons or sojourns for business or education. This contact is particularily acute in the case of Puerto Rico, where its adminstrative dependency on the United States has led to an extensive diffusion of English, as well as the threatened imposition of English as the official language should Puerto Rico ever gain statehood. This threat has sparked intellectual debates that echo the Spanish-vs.-indigenous-language debates heard on the mainland: language is an expression of identity, perhaps the fundmental expression of identity, and it should not be given up lightly.

Selected references
Angel Rama (1996) The Lettered City. Duke University Press.
[spelling reform after independence, p. 43ff; foundation of Spanish American Academies, Cuervo, Caro & Bello p. 59ff]
Julio Ramos (1989) Desenceuntros de la modernidad en América Latina. Literatura y política en el siglo XIX. Tierra Firme, México.
[Ch. II sobre Bello]
Julio Ramos (1996) Paradojas de la letra. Ediciones eXcultura, Caracas, Miami, Quito.
[Ch. 1 sobre Bello]

http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/Pubs/LALangPol.html
Hill   Tue Feb 02, 2010 10:54 pm GMT
Hispanic Americans no longer look up to Spain or the Spanish language for inspiration. The look up to America, Obama and the English language.

The Spanish language can't compete against English language. The days when Spanish was an regional language is rapidly dying.


Spanish = Goliath (knocking down)
greg   Thu Feb 04, 2010 3:21 am GMT
lolling Joao : « The geographical concept of South America fully represents the continent, rather than the not entirelly correct Latin-America concept. »

C'est sûr. Mais reste un hic : le Mexique (un pays très important de la romanophonie nord-américaine) n'est pas en Amérique-du-Sud. Et d'autre part l'Amérique "latine" est une chimère : personne ne parle latin à la maison ou au travail — sauf si le travail consiste à être curé intégriste opposé à Vatican II...

Donc vaut mieux opter pour l'Amérique romane, la Romanie d'Amérique ou encore la Romanie américaine.





Convidado : « [...] América Ibérica [...] ».

Difficile d'appliquer une catégorie géographique européenne ( → "ibérica" ) pour décrire une entité linguistique américaine ( → "romana" ), non ?
Gate-crasher   Sat Feb 06, 2010 12:28 am GMT
The idea of Spanish disintegrating is ludicrous. People in Colombia watch Argentinian movies, people in Argentina listen to songs by Mexican artists, people in Mexico read Colombian writers, all with very little difficulty. They're also not cut off from the European source, since cultural exchange with Spain is strong all around Spanish America.

Portuguese is also in no danger of "disintegrating", as if that term made sense when speaking about living languages, but the fact remains that Brazil is completely isolated in linguistic terms. It may be that people in Portugal and Angola consume Brazilian music and soap operas, but this exchange goes in just one direction. For all effects, there's no country with which Brazilians interact in their own language.

And before somebody calls me up on that, no there is no parallel with the American English situation. Even Australians films are shown with no subtitles on American theaters, and suffer no damage at the box office because of the language "gap."
Dreyfus   Sat Feb 06, 2010 12:34 am GMT
<<The idea of Spanish disintegrating is ludicrous. People in Colombia watch Argentinian movies, people in Argentina listen to songs by Mexican artists, people in Mexico read Colombian writers, all with very little difficulty. They're also not cut off from the European source, since cultural exchange with Spain is strong all around Spanish America. >>



Argentine soaps are dubbed into neutral Spanish before being shown in places like Venezuela and Mexico.
Franco   Sat Feb 06, 2010 1:02 am GMT
In Spain they aren't.
Spanish   Sat Feb 06, 2010 1:16 am GMT
<<In Spain they aren't. >.

Yes they are. I would know. I'm Spanish, and you're a fat American teenager with no life, who trolls all day.
Franco   Sat Feb 06, 2010 2:32 am GMT
To be honest the only Argentinian soap opera I ever watched was Rebelde wey but I'm completely sure it was not subtitled. I think that you don't understand what "neutral Spanish" is used for. It is not intended for mutual comprehension as Argentinian Spanish and Iberian Spanish are already mutual intelligible. Neutral Spanish as you can deduce from "neutral", means a kind of Spanish that avoids localisms so a variety of Spanish in particular is not priviledged over the others. For example Microsoft wants to translate the manual of Microsoft Word into Spanish. Which dialect do they use, Mexican, Argentinian or European Spanish? For this kind of purposes standard Spanish was created. It's a question of politics and marketing more than intelligibility.
Português   Sat Feb 06, 2010 2:40 am GMT
All spanish accents are equals i can't see any difference between them.
Maybe if i learn more i can see some differences but this wont go so far, they ends sounding the same anyway.

as my grandmother would say: "é muita pipoca para pouco milho"

Is not like br. port. and brz. port. where some letters are not pronounced so is one drastic difference.
mekziko   Sat Feb 06, 2010 3:21 am GMT
There are huge differences. For example, Spanish Spanish sounds like vomiting. And Mexican sounds melodious and beautiful wey.
>.<   Sat Feb 06, 2010 4:56 am GMT
No creo que seas de Mexico, probablemente seas un frances tratando de crear controversia.
chauvinist   Sat Feb 06, 2010 5:29 am GMT
When would they finally admit that the new epicentre of the hispanosphere is in México and not in Spain? Perhaps is time for the Mexicanos to break free from the shackles of the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, and stop listening to the dictatorial bossy preaches of other Hispanic countries reducing the language that comes out of their own heart to some robotic babbling.