Late-stage standardization and language ideology in the Colombian press

Abstract

This paper explores the ideological principles upheld in Nueva Granada with respect to the Spanish language in the late eighteenth century, immediately before the independent movement of the colonies. Late standardization, the stage of historical evolution examined in Colombia, is related to the Borboun Reforms implemented in South America in order to revamp the economy and lifestyle of some areas formerly neglected by the Spanish Crown. Bogota was enormously bene®ted by these Reforms and, as a result, changed its status from audiencia to Viceroyalty. One of the outcomes of these signi®cant changes is the boom of language studies (e.g. grammar, philology, and guides to ``good'' linguistic usage). The concern for language appeared consistently in the nascent journalism of the times. A sample of seven papers from Bogota (1765±1810) serve as corpus to examine the attitudes of linguistic purism, which gravitate toward Metropolitan Spanish. The attitudes of the status quo re¯ect, too, the desires to suppress lexicon originated in the indigenous languages and features of popular Spanish.