¡Viva el espanol!
By Angel Gurria-Quintana
Published: May 19 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 19 2007 03:00
There were scenes of chaos on the streets of Cartagena this spring. The usually serene Colombian port, with its famous fortified walls and colonial buildings, had probably not seen such throngs since the days when the Inquisition's public executions packed the squares. More than 2,000 policemen brought in for the occasion could do little to restore order. Around the convention centre in the Getsemani district, where African slaves once settled, push came to shove. "This is worse than a Shakira concert," someone grumbled.
It was an auspicious start for the fourth International Congress of the Spanish Language, the world's largest gathering of specialists on the history, grammar, usage and teaching of Spanish. Since the first meeting took place in the Mexican city of Zacatecas in 1997, they have been held every three years, more or less. This year, for four days at the end of March, members of the world's 22 Spanish- language academies - the institutions that adjudicate on linguistic issues within their respective countries - met for earnest discussions. The theme was weighty and wide-ranging: "The present and future of the Spanish language: unity within diversity."
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But the academicians attending the congress, often thought of as fusty, dictionary-wielding zealots, were not the reason the crowds came to Cartagena. Nor had they come to see the VIPs - Colombia's president, the Spanish royal family, Bill Clinton - being ushered into the hall. What the thousands of ticket-buyers were waiting for was a glimpse of the show's true star.
When he finally appeared, dressed in a crumpled white linen suit, the reception was delirious. The standing ovation lasted for five deafening minutes. Shouts of "Gabo, Gabo!" were drowned out by applause. The Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his bushy moustache whitened by age, still flashed the same impish smile that Francois Mitterrand once likened to that of a mischievous wizard.
There were good reasons for honouring Latin America's favourite writer. He had recently celebrated his 80th birthday. This year sees the 60th anniversary of the publication of his first short story, and the 40th anniversary of the publication of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is 25 years since Garcia Marquez won the Nobel prize for literature.
To mark the occasion, Spain's Real Academia Espanola de la Lengua (RAE), the supreme arbiter of the language and the force behind the Cartagena congress, has published a definitive edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude - an honour previously awarded only to Miguel de Cervantes and his 17th-century classic Don Quixote. The edition is expected to run to a million copies, using more than 800 tonnes of paper. Even this is not much when compared with the 50 million copies that have already been published worldwide (twice that number, according to some estimates, when pirated copies are included). "Readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude form a community that, if put together in the same place, would make up one of the world's 20 most-populated countries," said the author, flushed with pride, during the opening ceremony.
It isn't the first time that Garcia Marquez has stolen the show at one of these conferences. During an infamous closing speech at the Zacatecas event in 1997, he playfully proposed discarding spelling conventions. "Let's put spelling, which has terrorised humans from the cradle onwards, into retirement," he suggested to an audience of shocked academicians. Chastened by criticism, he later recanted. He had simply been playing devil's advocate, he said, because he had always been such a poor speller himself.
In a recent interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Victor Garcia de la Concha, director of the RAE, recalls explaining to Garcia Marquez what the suggested reforms (dropping accents, ditching the silent h, eradicating the differentiated use of g and j, and b and v) would mean in practice. "One of the great conquests of our language is the unity in spelling which occurred between 1884 and 1927. Look at what happens between countries like Brazil and Portugal, which lack unified spelling."
Celebrity authors aside, the discussion of serious subjects such as the unity of spelling is the real business of the Cartagena Congress. At a time when the use of Spanish is spreading faster than ever, the language's official guardians are under pressure to come up with some essential guidelines - pronto. "We must think about what happens to words imported from foreign languages, from the languages of advertising, and cybernetics," said Garcia de la Concha. "It would be convenient to establish some norms."
Such norms need not get in the way of daily usage. Garcia Marquez's iconoclastic outburst may have offended purists 10 years ago, but the Spanish-language academias in Spain, Latin America, the US and the Philippines have always kept their ears close to the ground. Since its foundation in 1713 the Real Academia's motto has been "limpia, fija y da esplendor" (it cleans, it fixes, and adds splendour). But in fact the RAE has been flexible in adopting new words. The new Diccionario Esencial de la Lengua Espanola (a Spanish-language version of the Concise Oxford Dictionary) includes such unavoidable modern terms as salvapantalla (screensaver), bulimico (bulimic), droga de diseno (designer drug) and gol de oro (golden goal).
Some of the important achievements announced at Cartagena had in fact occurred a few days earlier, in the Colombian city of Medellin, 700 kilometres south of Cartagena. There, in a widely hailed agreement, linguists from all countries with Spanish- speaking communities (except the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea) approved the creation of a unified system for examining students of Spanish as a foreign language - a sort of TOEFL (The Test of English as a Foreign Language) en espanol. This will ensure that foreigners studying the language in Spanish-speaking countries, or at any of the Cervantes Institutes throughout the world, are guaranteed equivalent teaching standards.
Another Medellin milestone was the approval of a revised grammar of the Spanish language. For the first time, an RAE-approved grammar - the yardstick for the correct use of language - will not be biased towards European Spanish. Instead, the Nueva Gramatica de la Lengua Espanola will emphasise common aspects and, where necessary, point out regional variations. The Real Academia seems at last to have come to terms with the fact that nine out of 10 of the world's native Spanish speakers live in Latin America.
The academicians, philologists, teachers and writers who met at Cartagena were in bullish spirits. Many, it seemed, were there to herald, or hear news of, the language's dramatic rise. Optimists think it is the language of the future, and they have some statistical support: with some 400 million native speakers, Spanish is currently the world's fourth-most-spoken language after Chinese, Hindi and English. By mid-century, according to some estimates, it is expected to surpass English in total number of native speakers. In Canada, where French is an official language, Spanish is more popular in schools - even in Quebec. Elsewhere, the Goethe Institute has been forced to close some of its offices and the Alliance Francaise has had to rent out its underused classrooms for Spanish lessons. Brazil recently decreed that Spanish be taught at school as a second language.
In Britain, demand to learn Spanish has overtaken German, and is now second only to French. According to Tristan Garel-Jones, president of Canning House, a London-based organisation that promotes Iberian and Latin American culture, Spanish is the most studied language in the UK's state schools. In one of the unlikeliest declarations to emerge from the Cartagena Congress, Garel-Jones announced: "Anglophones need to be protected from us."
Nowhere is the spread of Spanish as dramatic - and as divisive - as in the US, home to almost 50 million Hispanics. Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor who coined the phrase "clash of civilisations" to describe the cultural rift between Islam and the west, has aired his unease about the perceived threat to Anglo- American culture. "Spanish is joining the language of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts and the Kennedys as the language of the United States," he wrote in an article that formed the basis for his book Who Are We? The Challenge to America's National Identity. "If the spread of Spanish as the United States' second language continues, it could, in due course, have significant consequences in politics and government."
Indeed, while still in office, Bill Clinton warned that he would probably be one of the last American presidents who didn't speak Spanish. George W. Bush may not be fluent (unlike his brother Jeb) but all the same he has made it a custom to deliver a televised message in Spanish to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a traditional Mexican holiday much loved by America's Latinos.
Yet for every prophet of the ascendancy of Spanish as a global language there is a naysayer. Some argue that though the number of native Spanish speakers may be rising, learners of Spanish as a second language will never match the nearly one billion people learning English around the world. Others point out that Spanish is rarely used in scientific publications. Even more worrying is its weak presence on the internet.
While the guardians of language bandied about prognostications at Cartagena's convention centre, writers waxed lyrical about the shared identity of the world's 400 million speakers. In an article in El Pais published in the week of the conference, Antonio Munoz Molina, a Spanish novelist who lives in New York, wrote, "Spanish is a country that allows one to circulate through an unlimited variety of landscapes without being asked for a passport." Writing in the same newspaper, the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes wondered what the best name for this new continent of the Spanish language would be. Referring to the famous setting of Don Quixote, he wrote: "We are the territory of La Mancha."
Elsewhere, there was evidence that one of the deep historic rifts within this imagined community was finally healing. Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa had not been on speaking terms since 1976, when the two stars of Latin American literature exchanged blows at a film premiere in Mexico City (the altercation was, allegedly, over the Peruvian's wife). Vargas Llosa, who once wrote an essay praising One Hundred Years of Solitude, and had since refused to allow republication of the piece, allowed the RAE to include it in the introduction to the definitive edition.
It was a good time for the long-estranged friends to bury the hatchet, as the results emerged of a poll conducted to find the greatest Spanish-language novel of the past 25 years. Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, a fictionalised portrait of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, came second. The highest honour went to the old, mischievous wizard's Love in the Time of Cholera.
Even as the Cartagena Congress highlighted the diversity among Spanish speakers, it became clear that there was at least one thing that most citizens of the "Territory of La Mancha" agreed on. For Garcia Marquez, the event was a coronation. Asked by journalists to compare the week's excitement with the heady days when he received the Nobel prize, he replied: "That was Stockholm. This is Cartagena. The party is much bigger here."
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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