Is Spanish a happy language? Supossely Yes. The International Congress of the Language of Cádiz, closed this afternoon by the Minister Spokesperson for the Government, Isabel Rodríguez, has ended with renewed vows of fidelity: in the coming years there will be more state policies aimed at promoting the language and its culture because without culture , democracy is worse, as the minister said in her speech. There will also be more technological research so that artificial intelligence can speak correctly in Spanish and there will be a promise to coexist generously and in fraternity with neighboring languages and cultures in America and also in Spain: the Royal Spanish Academy has joined forces these days with its peers from Galician, Catalan and Basque languages. And above all: the risk of language fragmentation, the possibility that a Chilean and a Cuban stop understanding each other in the same way that a Saudi and a Moroccan speak different Arabic will continue to be far away. "We are optimistic people regarding Spanish," said Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the Royal Spanish Academy.
What then is the challenge? Muñoz Machado spoke in the morning of the trend towards "fragmentation in digital dialects" as the concern that will have to be monitored in the coming years. What do we understand by digital dialects? "The abandonment of the regulations in the networks", the fact that streamers, youtubers, twitterers and other crazy people on the hill, not very rigorous in their way of expressing themselves, could create, according to the most pessimistic hypothesis, a jargon and a linguistic logic incomprehensible to those who are not in the game. During the closing of the Congress, a video showed the vigor and the language of this new culture: "Sometimes they are not easy to understand," said Muñoz Machado.
The director of the Royal Academy has been warning for months that this is going to be one of the lines of work of the institution. Next summer, the RAE will publish a study on the deterioration of the language skills of Spanish students. The effort of all the Spanish academies to renew their normative work responds to this challenge. "We must strengthen the quality of the regulation and insist on the pan-Hispanic norm," said the director of the RAE. Not more inflexible but better. New editions of the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts and the Glossary of Grammatical Terms have debuted in Cádiz, two works aimed at explaining how to apply the rules of the language.
How serious is that risk? "I am not a pessimist. I believe that the speakers are capable of differentiating planes. The fact that in their WhatsApp messages they use language in one way does not necessarily imply that they are not capable of speaking correctly in other areas", explains Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute. "The border will be at the moment in which the speakers no longer know how to differentiate, when the students forget that it is not the same to write on social networks as in a university exam. As long as that does not happen, I am calm. Me too I took class notes with abbreviations", adds Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, linguist and academic at the RAE.
Muñoz Machado and García Montero gave the Congress a good grade. The director of the RAE said that the organization (transferred at the last minute from Arequipa to Cádiz) has been satisfactory thanks to the work "in cooperation and collaboration" between the academies, Cervantes, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cádiz City Council. Luis García Montero made the same analysis and said that the rumors that said the opposite responded to the complex nature of some people. The influx of public and online monitoring has been satisfactory. Tomorrow, the academies will decide the next seat of the Congress: the normal thing will be that Arequipa has a new opportunity.
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