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Walter Cronkite's Spanish Can't be regulated from Madrid, Spain

Walter Cronkite's Spanish Can't be regulated from Madrid, Spain

“Here are all the voices, all the ways of speaking, coming together in a grand polyphony”, asserted this month in Madrid, Spain, Don Victor García de la Concha…

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“Here are all the voices, all the ways of speaking, coming together in a grand polyphony”, asserted this month in Madrid, Spain, Don Victor García de la Concha, Chairman of the “Real Academy of the Spanish Language.”

We get so hang up in formality in our Hispanic world --one of the strengths of our rich culture, but unfortunately also one of our major weaknesses-- that we have even created a sort of Temple for the Letters, a Church for our Phonetics, or perhaps a Holy Inquisition for our simple grammar and worse spellings.

“Real Academy of the Spanish Language” is a creation difficult to understand for mainstream America., which smartly rejected the similar legalistic notion of English is the “Officcial Language” of the US, or worse yet, a “Royal Academy of the English Language.,” based somewhere in London.

One of my “Anglo” friends in this wonderful and polyphonic North America we happen to live in, here in Philadelphia, handed over to me, almost in horror, a clip from the Inquirer, our prestigious metropolitan daily, with the latest news from Madrid indicating that the famous “Real Academy of the Spanish Language” has issued, after 33 years of silence in this regard, “new legislation” on what is “legal or illegal” in terms of speaking or writing the “idioma de Cervantes” (The language used by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of the world-wide famous “El Quijote”).

In 2 thick volumes, sanctioned by a body of high-brow academicians from the Peninsula, and 21 “sister organizations” from all over Latin America, the Academy, still centered in Madrid, is defining (although, obviously, that is not their public intention), who speaks the legitimate form of the language, and, as a consequence, who doesn’t.

In other words, this new “Grammar Code of the Language “, as one Dominican member of the board of doctors overseeing the project calls it, determines the legitimate Spanish, and, as a consequence, creates an open space to label “the other” along with its bastardized practices.

My “Anglo” friend, handing over his underlined clip from the Inquirer, said to me shaking his head, with a broad smile on his face:

“There is something here that doesn’t fit”.

“The biggest change from the existing grammar, which dates back to 1931 –the AP news piece reproduced by the Inquirer says--, is that the new book reflects how the language is spoken where most Spanish-speakers actually live: Latin America.”

“How about the US Spanish, our own unique of Walter Cronkite Spanish we take so much pride on, spoken by over 50 million Latinos in the US?”, says another friend, this one a US born Latino, with 2 advances academic degrees, one from Latin America and another one from the US.

“Since obviously our own unique use of the language wasn’t the core of the 2 volumes, do they automatically qualify us as the ‘new bastards’, perhaps great grandsons and great granddaughters of Queen Elizabeth I of England, (the “whore King Ferdinand the VII talked about in the 17th Century)?

This friend also makes me think:

Are we, then, the over 50 million Latinos from the US the very people who speak the most improper Spanish in the world?

Especially since we sometimes take pride on the unique way they speak it, calling it sometimes Spanglish, to just differentiate from others, maybe also bastardized forms of the language, like the one used, say, in Tijuana, México?

This Latino friend made me think: They sometimes even write it like that, and are awarded high honors for doing so.

Take, for example, the case of Mr. Junot Diaz, now considerate a new US Laurate Poet from the Northeast, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner that, you may say, using the strict definitions contained in the heavy codes sent from Madrid, “massacres Spanish” every time he can, walking all over the ghetto Spanish and ghetto English of his youth-- 2 opposite worlds he was forced to travel back and forth in nona-seconds in his tormented mind while growing up in a miserable neighborhood of the post industrialized urban America of the end of the 20th Century.

It wasn’t Junot’s fault he speaks, writes in that “jeringonza”.

His parents, 2 poor Dominicans immigrants, were forced to come to the US at the last Century, given the obvious lack of basic food and basic shelter in the impoverished former Spanish Colony (called “La Hispaniola, but now known as Dominican Republic), after the over 300-years plundering by the “Conquistadores” and their descendants.

The words written by Diaz, which are sometimes harsh, sometimes melancholic, sometimes angered, blatantly says that he chooses to say it in English, in Spanish, or in Spanglish (“come sea, coño!”), as long as he manages to get it out with authenticity and somebody cares to read and understand it with sensibility.

Is he the ultimate “bastard writer”?

Perhaps (Sorry, Junot). So much that the Body of Judges of the “Real Academy of the Spanish Language” will be very glad to fry him one of these days, after making him confess through special sessions, in dark chambers, that he is, indeed, a blasphemous user of the sacred Spanish originated Madrid, and that Old Spain still wants to define and control remotely.

“El Fu-cú is back, pues!,” Junot may say, with a bitter smile.

George López, famous US Latino Comedian, and also known user of ‘Spanglish’, may reinforce with an unpronounceable expletive: “FTP!”

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