The North American Academy of the Spanish Language celebrates 50 years

2023-06-03 09:59:52

Founded in 1973, ANLE was admitted only seven years later to the “family” of the Association of Language Academies, together with its peers in the Hispanic world, and like the others, it is in charge of advising institutions on the proper use of Spanish. and the media “with criteria of ownership and correctness”, as its deputy director, Jorge Covarrubias, recalls in a written interview.

ANLE has not escaped the country’s political turbulence, and in fact one of its main achievements, which was supervising the White House’s Spanish-language website for decades, came to naught after the page was shut down during the administration of Donald Trump, although Joe Biden has re-enabled it.

The academy is active in the networks, publishes books, gives talks at universities and gives language advice when required, but it also boasts of editing “one of the best magazines of all academies”, according to its director.

One of his main concerns is to take care that “the use of the Hispanounidense (sic) variant does not affect the unity and comprehension of the language in the Hispanic sphere”, a diplomatic way of saying that the so-called espanglish does not become unintelligible to a Spanish speaker or derives in a different form of language.

In a country where Spanish is still a minority language —even if it is the second language—, ANLE aspires to collaborate in projects and plans to extend the teaching of Spanish in a country that is usually reluctant to introduce foreign languages, as well as « strengthen authentic bilingualism”, adds Covarrubias.

Tomorrow’s forum will not shy away from some of the most contentious issues of recent times, such as the use of inclusive language, which in the United States has been translated into the term latinxsrejected by many Spanish speakers as foreign to the logic of Spanish.

According to ANLE figures, Spanish is the language of current use of 41 million people “at home”, which does not even represent the entire Latino population, since this totals 62 million people.

In his diagnosis of the state of Spanish in the country, Covarrubias does not hesitate to describe it as “flourishing”, and underlines a unique characteristic: being “the best laboratory to observe what the future of our language will be due to its condition of housing people who have arrived from all countries where Spanish is spoken.