"Los herexiarcas de la lengua” (1892). Ricardo Palma y su controversia con la Real Academia Española

Abstract

In 1892, Ricardo Palma attends the festivities that, due to the commemorations of the IV Centenary of the Discovery of America, would take place in various Spanish cities. The Peruvian writer does not miss the opportunity to attend different meetings of the RAE with the aim of requesting the inclusion in the Dictionary of widely disseminated voices in America that this work had not incorporated. His proposal is almost completely rejected. However, Palma continued his reflection on the facts of language, and kept up his interest in compiling neologisms. This collector's task is specified in his two lexicographical books –Neologismos y americanismos (1896) and Papeletas lexicográficas (1903)– and it is relevant both within his work, as well as in different battles for the language that took place in Latin America. The purpose of the work, consequently, is to present the dissent that Palma expresses with respect to the position of the Academy and the position that the Peruvian traditionist assumes in these disputes. On the one hand, manifestation of a place of authority regarding the knowledge of “American Spanish”. Secondly, we postulate that the Academy's censorship to admit the voices proposed by Palma is linked to Beatriz González Stephan's idea of the existence of "disciplinary writings" embodied in books that, like dictionaries, establish homogenization rules that try to avoid the disintegration of the language and, therefore, and in this case, mitigate the fear of the breakdown of the unity of the Hispanic world, a unity established precisely by the common language.