The
Real Academia Española (
Spanish for "Royal Spanish Academy";
RAE) is the institution responsible for regulating the
Spanish language. It is based in
Madrid,
Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in 21
Spanish-speaking nations through the
Association of Spanish Language Academies. Its emblem is a fiery crucible, and its
motto is
Limpia, fija y da esplendor ("It cleans, sets, and gives splendor"). Modelled after the Italian
Accademia della Crusca (1582) and the French
Académie française (1635), its purpose was "to fix the voices and vocabularies of the
Castilian language with propriety, elegance, and purity".
History
The RAE was founded in
1713 by
Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco,
marquis of
Villena and
duke of
Escalona. One description of its aim is "to assure that Spanish speakers will always be able to read
Cervantes", but it also exercises a progressive influence in keeping the formal language up-to-date: one such step was its
1994 ruling that the Spanish consonants
ch and
ll would be alphabetized with
c and
l, respectively, and not as separate letters as in the past. Other steps include eliminating accents on words of one syllable that don't serve to change the meaning of the word. Examples include: dio, vio (which both had an accent on the o). One example of a one-syllable word which maintains the accent is
sé ('I know', first person singular present of
saber, to know, or singular imperative of
ser, to be) in order to differentiate it from
se which is used as a reflexive pronoun. The Academy also watches small details, such as adding an accent in
1959 to the orthography of conjugations of
reunir (to reunite, to gather (together)) to ensure that the
eu wasn't taken as a diphthong.
The RAE is a major publisher of
dictionaries and
grammars and has a formal procedure for admitting words to its publications. Its website includes an online dictionary and many other resources, all in Spanish. Its most widely-recognized publication is the
Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española.
Criticisms of the Academy
The Academy has received criticism, particularly in
the Americas, for being excessively
conservative,
elitist, and slow to change; excessively focused on usages found in the
Madrid region and dismissive of variants found in other parts of Spain, let alone other countries; and slow in revising its authoritative
Diccionario de la Lengua Española. The dictionary has also been the target of criticisms for its partial definitions and somewhat limited coverage. Supporters respond saying that RAE's purpose isn't to register local or ephemeral uses of Spanish but to try to protect a united Spanish language and to prevent national variants from becoming incomprehensible to other Hispanics, a task in which RAE seems to be enjoying a degree of success.
Even most of the Academy's fiercest critics acknowledge that recent versions of the dictionary (the 20th and subsequent editions) have shown distinct improvements in this regard. One innovation that was particularly welcomed was its release in a
paperback format in
1992. After partnerships with companies like
Telefónica,
IBM and
Microsoft, the RAE is in the process of updating and adapting to the new information-technology era and now offers a free online version of its dictionary, which can be consulted at
buscon.rae.es/diccionario/drae.htm
.
It is also collecting historical
corpora of Spanish texts. There has been criticism that, in spite of public funding, the results of RAE research are not provided under
free licences.
Academicians (académicos de número)
Members of the Academy are
académicos de número, chosen from among prestigious persons in the sciences and the arts, including several
Spanish-language authors. Also known as the 'Inmortales' (possibly as the Spanish translation of their counterparts at the Académie française), they're elected for life by the rest of the academicians. Each academician has a seat labelled with a letter of the
Spanish alphabet; upper and lower case letters are separate seats.
Current members of the Academy
As of 2006, sorted by date of induction:
Notable past academicians
Not an exhaustive list
Dámaso Alonso
Camilo José Cela
Leandro Fernández de Moratín
Fernando Lázaro Carreter
Julián Marías
Benito Pérez Galdós
Elena Quiroga
Gonzalo Torrente Ballester
External results
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