Regulatory Policies and Institutions of Contemporary Spanish Language

• Autores: María Florencia Rizzo
• Localización: The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to twentieth and twenty-first century Spain: ideas, practices, imaginings / coord. por Eduardo Ledesma, Luisa Elena Delgado, 2025, ISBN 978-1-032-96468-3, págs. 274-284
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This chapter reviews the Spanish language policies and regulatory institutions which have been involved in its expansion as an international language, considering the phase that began in the 1990s in the framework of globalization. Historically, Spanish has been regulated by specific linguistic management institutions. Outstanding among these is the Real Academia Española, which has served as a normative agent since its foundation in 1713 and currently still leads the network of language academies across the Spanish-speaking world. The chapter examines the changes in Spanish language policies since the 1990s from a glottopolitical perspective. Glottopolitics studies actions on language considering its social dimensions and relates them to broader processes in which they make sense. These changes are addressed as complex phenomena, linking them to the international policies implemented by the Spanish state and to the impact of globalization processes on languages through reviews of different interventions on the international management of Spanish, pertaining to both language status and to corpus planning. These actions are performed not only by the academies themselves but also by other agents – with different scopes and interests – that vie for a position of influence in areas and projects involving the Spanish language. Specifically, the chapter examines the pan-Hispanic project fomented by the Real Academia Española since the 1990s and the regulatory actions on language in digital contexts, as well as interventions in the international promotion of Spanish as a foreign language led by the Cervantes Institute. The chapter also considers some initiatives currently underway in the Americas, which have been conceived from non-hegemonic standpoints.