Guardians of Spanish Turn to Internet

The guardians of Spanish are turning to computers and the Internet to propel the language into the 21st century as one of the world’s most widely spoken tongues.

Spain’s 200-year-old Royal Spanish Language Academy is converting index cards crammed with material dating back centuries into a 250-million-word computerized reference site on the Internet.

English already has a 100-million-word British National Corpus, a database that academics consider the standard reference for the British branch of the most important language in international discourse. French and German have more modest databanks.

“It’s imperative that we do not fall behind in the trend of computerization and the Internet,” says Fernando Lazaro Carreter, the Royal Academy’s director. “The [Spanish] language and its unity depend on it.”

The academy has the backing of the Cervantes Institute, which promotes the language outside the more than 20 Spanish-speaking nations.

“The times can be compared to the 16th century with the advent of the printing press,” says Santiago de Mora-Figueroa, director of the Cervantes Institute. “We are witnessing a revolution in communications and we must make the most of it.”

Ten centuries after people first began using it, Spanish is spoken by about 350 million people worldwide. English, the world’s lingua franca, has about 500 million speakers.

Chinese has the most speakers, but few use it outside China. French, once the language of diplomacy and social elites around the globe, is dwindling in importance and has about 100 million speakers.

“Spanish is growing not just in the numbers of speakers but also the economic weight of the countries that use it,” de Mora-Figueroa says.

The aggressive promotion of Spanish coincides with Spain’s expanding involvement abroad, both economically and culturally, since the ending in 1978 of the straitjacket isolation imposed by decades of dictatorship.

The Cervantes Institute, founded in 1991 and named after Miguel de Cervantes, author of the Spanish language’s most famous novel, “Don Quixote,” now operates 35 centers around the world and has a Web page.

The institute published a report this year calling for the use of Spanish in all international forums, including the scientific and technological world traditionally dominated by English.

“In all of this we will be betting heavily on the Internet,” de Mora-Figueroa says.

The language crusaders don’t fear Spanish is being overwhelmed by English, but say they must keep abreast of the times to avoid the disintegration of Spanish into many dialects and the loss of international ranking.

Computers were a rarity just three years ago at the Royal Spanish Language Academy, which was founded in 1790 with the mission “to clean, establish and give splendor” to the Spanish language.

Today, the basement of the academy’s grandiose 19th century building has been converted into a computerized beehive, where 60 specialists are keying in tens of thousands of texts for the reference bank for the new millennium.

Compiled with the aid of affiliate academies in Latin America, samples range from notes jotted in the margins of books by 10th century Spanish monks to recent editions of Latin American newspapers and transcribed radio and street conversations.

The databank will be a complete representation of the language, says Guillermo Rojo, a linguistics professor in charge of the effort.

“People who have a word or phrase they want to check will just have to key it into their computer on the Internet and within seconds the corpus [databank] will be able to tell you where and when it has been used, with what frequency and connotations.”

The computerization of the academy isn’t without skeptics.

Colombian novelist Garbriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, visited the academy last year. With evident doubt, he challenged his hosts to use the computer to find the word avorazar--to be voracious.

Within seconds, it not only found the word but also offered textual references of its usage, including examples from Garcia Marquez’s own works.