Lengua, prestigio y prejuicios linguisticos : Algunas consideraciones sobre el espanol

Abstract

This paper deals with some aspects of the important relationship between language and prestige, and the social and psychological factors it involves. The concept of prestige plays a significant role in the various processes of language change, and it seems to be closely related to other concepts such as power, status, social class, linguistic use or grammatical acceptability. However, the difficulties to define it — either as an attitude or as a particular behaviour — and to describe the characteristics of those prestigious groups still remain. In connexion with this, we will discuss the idea of a prestigious standard variety of a language, Spanish, which arises, surrounded by a series of contradictions : apparently, the phonetic features shared by an overwhelming majority of the speakers of this worldwide language have traditionally been regarded as deviations from the Castilian (standard) norm, and involve different attitudes and reactions. References will be made to some data provided by the analysis of the speech of some of the characters in two short comedies, El genio alegre (1907), and Puebla de las mujeres (1912), written by S. and J. Alvarez Quintero, two popular Spanish comedian playwriters who were very successful in depicting the habits of their contemporary Spanish society in the first three decades of this century. The stigmatized features of one of the Spanish dialects were encoded in the speech of the low-class characters in these comedies, which clearly indicates the social connotations involved in certain sounds. Divergence between pronunciation and orthography, that is textual language, seems to establish the idea of correction, and, hence, of the prestigious and standard variety of a language.