The Challenge of Writing Spanish

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is not such a thing as “one” Spanish language. With almost 500 million native speakers and recognized as an official language in twenty different countries around the world, Spanish presents many differences among its varieties.

The more prominent are the lexical differences; for instance, the fact that a word like “guagua” means ‘baby’ for some Spanish speakers and ‘bus’ for others. However, not all differences are related to vocabulary. There are many which involve morphosyntactic variations, such as the use of the pronoun “vosotros” in Spain, while the Spanish spoken in the Americas chooses “ustedes” instead. There are, as well, many phonetic differences; the way people pronounce the same words. These, however, do not appear as so significant when it comes to written documents.

These variations do pose a challenge when it comes to writing a text in Spanish, since, whatever the topic or the target audience may be, the writer is going to make a number of choices regarding whether they wish the text to be understood by any Spanish speaker or whether they desire it to be directed to a specific group of speakers. Any of those options involve having a full understanding of the nuances of the different varieties of Spanish, as well as a certain understanding of how language works and a knowledge of what tools are available to help the process.

The Pan-Hispanic educated standard

To address the many versions of Spanish that exist, the Spanish speaking world has devised a series of strategies to keep the language from wandering too far afield. While geographical expansion and an increasing number of native speakers are factors that induce natural linguistic change and variation, institutions such as the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy) and the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (Association of Academies of the Spanish Language), in which the RAE works with twenty-three other local language academies, strive to regularize the language. These twenty-four academies develop their work all across the Spanish speaking world, from South America to Equatorial Guinea and even the United States.

These institutions cooperate in gathering all sorts of data about language usage, and also provide common reference works on Spanish language, both activities simultaneously directed toward picking up the richness of the different varieties and ensuring that they keep a certain degree of broad inter-intelligibility, to the latter focused primarily on the written language.

Tools for linguists

Thus, there are several tools available for people that need to work with and communicate through Spanish, which allow them to identify points of importance such as what is considered the current educated standard, usages that may not be appropriate for a certain location, or the best way to communicate to as many Spanish speakers as possible, reverting to a sort of “neutral” Spanish, which, in itself, it is not much more than a nice utopia, but which is possible to partially achieve by closely studying the language used in a particular text.

Pan-Hispanic tools

Some of the main tools that help to address Spanish language from a Pan-Hispanic point of view are:

Diccionario de la lengua española (Dictionary of the Spanish Language), compiled and updated by the RAE since its first edition, in 1780.

Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts), which is focused on solving common problems that the usage of Spanish poses, while also considering some local variants, particularly those that are extensive among broad groups of Spanish speakers.

Ortografía de la lengua española, an official reference work which describes and makes explicit the proper orthography of the Spanish language.

Nueva gramática de la lengua española, which compiles the entire description of the Spanish grammar, including a phonetic and phonological volume and one devoted to morphology and syntax.

Tools for detecting local variations of Spanish

On the other hand, other tools allow one to identify variations in Spanish. The main ones are:

Diccionario de americanismos (Dictionary of Americanisms), which compiles the lexicon used in the many Spanish speaking countries in the Americas.

Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI (CORPES XXI), which constitutes what is known as a linguistic corpus; i. e., it gathers thousands of texts that build an extensive database of language usage in the 21st century. Every text that is added to this linguistic corpus is tagged with a source, date, and location of origin, thus providing a way to identify what uses are common in different areas and in different types of texts (for instance, journalism, fiction, etc.).

Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), another linguistic corpus, very similar to the above mentioned, which instead gathers texts from 1975 up to 2004.

Answering the questions “Spanish, but which one?” and “Spanish, but how?” is one of the things we do here at Lapsus Calami, drawing on this set of tools and our own experience and training. We are based in Chile, South America, which gives us a more intimate understanding – feeling for, if you wish – of Chilean and Argentinian Spanish. Nonetheless, we can proofread, copyedit, write or localize texts targeted for other countries, as well as those that need to be as Pan-Hispanic as possible. Get in touch with us and let us discuss your project.