El espanol de America.

• Author: Hernandez Martin, Jorge

For centuries language was considered a biological function; as a result, it was studied exclusively in the context of the natural sciences. The analysis of the relationship among language, thought, and society was long in coming. The word linguistics, used to indicate the existence of a science, appears in 1833; the term linguist can be found in the work of the Frenchman Francois Raynouard in 1816. The writer and critic Julia Kristeva feels that as the Renaissance enthroned Man, so our era has replaced the cult of Man with the study of language as a scientific subject. The human being is language and language is the human being. Linguistics is dedicated to the exploration of social practices through which human beings demarcate, signify, and communicate, i.e., define and portray themselves in language.

In this way language can be regarded as a link used by human beings to connect their separate histories. Fontanella de Weinberg's book looks at the nature of linguistic expression as a means whereby Spanish-speaking people in Latin America relate to each other. As early as 1932, Pablo Henriquez Urena trained his eye and ear on the hemisphere and cautiously declared that Latin American linguistic reality was a varied, multiform entity. The author takes this observation of the Dominican philologist as her starting point and finds that American Spanish is not an entity defined in fiat opposition to European Spanish but an entity that can only be defined geographically and historically. Still the assertion is surprising: It could be argued, for example, that seseo (the pronunciation of c before i and e, and z in all positions, as s rather than th as in tooth) is a general feature of American Spanish. But seseo can be similarly found in Andalusia and the Canary Islands.

Curiously, the varieties of Spanish spoken in the twenty Hispano-American nations sometimes show more affinities with peninsular Spanish than among themselves. What they uniformly share is a common history closely linked to a process of conquest and colonization. Even so, the language was transplanted to the New World at different times in different places, sometimes by expansion and sometimes by direct migration from the metropolis. The result was a complex linguistic situation which Fontanella de Weinberg...