Everything about Spanish Royal Academy totally explained
The
Real Academia Española (“Royal Spanish Academy”), the
RAE, is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the
Spanish language. It is based in
Madrid,
Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one
Spanish-speaking nations through the
Association of Spanish Language Academies. The RAE's emblem is a fiery crucible, and its
motto is
Limpia, fija y da esplendor (“(It) Cleans, sets, and casts splendour”).
History
The
Real Academia Española was founded in 1713, modelled after the Italian
Accademia della Crusca (1582) and the French
Académie française (1635), with the purpose
to fix the voices and vocabularies of the Castilian language with propriety, elegance, and purity. King Phillip V approved its constitution on 3rd October 1714, placing it under the Crown's protection.
Its aristocrat founder,
Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco, Marquis of
Villena and Duke of
Escalona, described its aims as:
to assure that Spanish speakers will always be able to read Cervantes — by exercising a progressive up-to-date maintenance of the formal language.
In 1994, it ruled that the Spanish consonants
CH (ché) and
LL (elle) would hence be alphabetized under
C and under
L, respectively, and not as separate, discrete letters, as in the past. The RAE eliminated monosyllabic accented vowels where the accent didn't serve in changing the word's meaning, examples include:
dio ("gave"),
vio ("saw"), both had an acutely-accented vowel
ó; yet the monosyllabic word:
sé ("I know", the first person, singular, present of
saber, "to know"; and the singular imperative of:
ser,"to be") retains its acutely-accented vowel in order to differentiate it from the reflexive pronoun
se.
In 1959 it added an acute accent (from upper-right to lower-left) to the orthography (spelling) of conjugations, for example, to:
reunió ("reunited", "gathered together") a past form of:
reunir ("to reunite", "to gather together") to ensure that the individual letters
eu were spoken
individually, and
not as a single-sound diphthong.
The RAE is a major publisher of
dictionaries and
grammars, and has a formal procedure for admitting words to its publications. Its website includes an online dictionary and other resources, all in Spanish, of course. Its most famous publication is the
Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española (Dictionary of the Spanish Language of the Royal Spanish Academy), the "DRAE".
Criticisms of the Academy
The Royal Spanish Academy has been criticised, especially in the Spanish-speaking Americas, for being excessively
conservative and elitist and slow to change; for excessively concentrating upon linguistic usages of the region of Madrid, while dismissing variant usages from other parts of Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries; and for being slow in revising its authoritative
Diccionario de la Lengua Española.
Moreover, the dictionary has been criticised for its partial definitions and somewhat limited coverage. Supporters respond that the RAE's purpose isn't registering ephemeral Spanish usages, but to protect a united Castilian language and prevent national variants from becoming incomprehensible to other Spanish speakers.
Critics have acknowledged, however, that recent editions of the
Diccionario de la Lengua Española de la Real Academia Española (the 20th, 21st, and current 22nd editions) show distinct improvement. One welcome innovation was its publication of a
paperback edition in 1992. Partnerships with companies such as
Telefónica,
IBM, and
Microsoft, have enabled the RAE to update and adapt to the current information-technology era, offering a free on-line version of its Dictionary, which may be consulted free of charge at
buscon.rae.es/diccionario/drae.htm
.
Moreover, while it's currently collecting historical Spanish texts, the
Academia has come under fire for not making its research results available under
free licences, despite
public funding.
Academicians (académicos de número)
Members of the Academy are
Académicos de número, "Number Academics", chosen from among prestigious persons in the Arts and Sciences, including several
Spanish-language authors, known as the
Los Inmortales, "The Immortals" (the possible Spanish translation of their
Académie française counterparts), they're elected for life by the other academicians. Each academician holds a seat labeled with a letter from the
Spanish alphabet; upper- and lower case letters are separate seats.
Current members of the Academy
As of 2006, sorted by date of induction:
Notable past academicians
Not an exhaustive list
Dámaso Alonso
Camilo José Cela
Leandro Fernández de Moratín
Fernando Lázaro Carreter
Julián Marías
Benito Pérez Galdós
Elena Quiroga
Gonzalo Torrente BallesterFurther Information
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