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EFE News Service

Spanish Language Academies Say Spanglish Not A Threat

October 26, 2000
Copyright © 2000 EFE News Service. All Rights Reserved.
Source: World Reporter (TM)

Oviedo, Spain - Real Academia Espa[ola (RAE) director Victor Garcia de la Concha and Language Academies Association secretary Humberto Lopez Morales, recipients of this year's Prince of Asturias Award, said Thursday that "Spanglish" does not threaten the Spanish language but does threaten English.

De la Concha and Lopez Morales spoke on the status of the Spanish language during a visit the directors of the 22 corresponding and associate member academies of the RAE made to the University of Oviedo library.

Lopez Morales, from Puerto Rico, said the use of "Spanglish" - a mix of Spanish and English - by U.S. Hispanics does not undermine the Spanish language, while de la Concha said the use of Spanglish posed a serious problem for English, not Spanish.

While the Spanish-language U.S. media and schools continue to uphold correct grammar "there is no danger," Lopez Morales indicated, adding that his organization's project to create a dictionary of Latin American words and expressions ("Diccionario de Americanismos"), which was launched in 1996, will be completed in four years and will include 125,000 entries.

The new dictionary will have a significantly higher number of entries than the last edition of the REA dictionary, which had 83,000 entries.

Meanwhile, the academies are also working on a Pan-Hispanic dictionary of usage, "which will be permanently alive on the Internet" and will allow the academies to quickly resolve doubts or answer questions posed by Spanish users, De la Concha said.

Also scheduled to receive the Prince of Asturias Award during a ceremony Friday are Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, for fostering international cooperation, Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, for literature, U.S. soprano Barbara Hendricks, for performance arts, and Italian writer Umberto Eco, for communication and humanities.

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