Isabel Laguna Cádiz, (EFE).- Should Spanish, a language spoken in 20 countries, find another name? The Argentine writer Martín Caparrós, has asked this Tuesday at the IX International Congress of Language, to open this debate and has proposed “ñamericano” as a new name for this language.
The Mexican writer Juan Villoro has also considered this debate necessary because, in his opinion, the name Spanish for a language in which a fifth of its speakers are Mexican is “an archaism.” For him, the language “strictly speaking” should be called “Hispanic-American.”
Both writers have launched these name proposals at the table “El español, lengua común. Miscegenation and interculturality in the Spanish-speaking community” in which they have participated together with the Peruvian writer Alonso Cueto, the Spanish Carme Riera and the Spanish essayist Ángel López García.
For Martín Caparrós “it is time to look for a common name” for this language, so that it is not that of one of the twenty countries in which it is spoken.
“It is worth looking for the name of what we speak about,” he says about Spanish. He comes up with “ñamericano”, which preserves the originality of the tilde of the ñ, a result, he has said, of the “laziness” of the monks for writing the n twice.
Enrich the language with another name
The author of the essay “Ñamérica” believes that the word “Spanish”, which when the Phoenicians invented it meant “land of rabbits”, is “undoubtedly tricky”.
Spain is today a country “full of Spaniards who want to be, or not” and who “would say” that “they should not fully believe it, because they have to repeat it three times and sing ‘I am Spanish, Spanish, Spanish’.
The concept of “Spanish” is “in contention” especially in the field of language, he has pointed out to remember how he always thought that what he spoke or what Lope de Vega wrote was “Castilian”.
“Saying Spanish would have sounded like the product of a country called Spain,” he commented to reason that, in his opinion, “it would be logical that 450 million do not want to think that they speak someone else’s language.”
For Martín Caparrós, looking for another name would be enriching a language that has been formed “with the breath of many languages and that is not attributed to any kingdom”.
For Juan Villoro, the miscegenation of the Spanish language has advanced so much that it has left behind times in which it seemed that Spanish “was only spoken in one way” and in which the concierge of a hotel in Madrid did not understand when a Peruvian client I called him to say “excuse me, the tub spout has broken, I need a plumber”.
Or that, as Alonso Cueto has recalled, in the dubbing of the films John Wayne could be heard entering a canteen in a western and asking the waiter “chato, give me a short” or Tarzan calling his monkey “Concepción” through the jungle. , instead of “Chita”.
The traffic of words
Alonso Cueto has celebrated that now the “traffic of words” between one side of the Atlantic and the other is “more nourished than ever”, thanks to “the path” that publishers such as Carlos Barral have marked, who published novels by writers such as Mario Vargas in Spain Llosa or Juan Rulfo. The “pollination” of the language has also spread through tourism, commerce, immigration or television.
“The idea of the purity of the language is useless and anachronistic”, has maintained the writer, for whom English words such as “chip” will remain in the language as Arabic terms such as ditch did before.
“We will always be proudly impure,” he added after stating that Spanish is “a living organism” that has “the engine room” for its renewal in colloquial speech.”
However, he has considered it “terrible” to verify that “we have lost wealth” in a world in which an emoticon replaces words such as “I congratulate you or I love you”.
mixed language
This loss of wealth occurs in a language that is spoken in countries like Mexico, where today only 6.6% of the indigenous languages that were spoken when the country gained independence are spoken, or in Peru, where they have disappeared. 37 original languages and there are 21 in imminent danger of destruction, and where Quechua resists ten million inhabitants.
López García has recalled how Spanish is a mestizo language long before the colonization of America, when, before the 10th century, Latin crossed the Camino de Santiago with Galician or Catalan words.
And, like Carme Riera, he has explained that at the time of the conquest “there was no interest in spreading Spanish.” Indigenous languages were surely favored “in a selfish attitude” to avoid competition when applying for posts in the administration.
It was when the countries became independent when “all claimed Spanish as their national language”, the language that is being debated in Cádiz in 2023. EFE
