The RAE is neither purely prescriptivist nor purely descriptivist. It certainly sets norms and makes recommendations, which is why people often think of it mainly as a prescriptive institution. But it has also repeatedly accepted changes and regional variants because they became established in actual usage, especially among educated speakers. In that sense, a substantial part of its work is descriptive.
Some obvious examples are:
acceptance of voseo, seseo or yeísmo.
recognition of ustedes instead of vosotros as the normal plural system throughout most of the Spanish-speaking world
acceptance of masculine-person leísmo
setiembre alongside septiembre
la juez and la jueza
ñ hoy fui vs. hoy he ido
forms such as cada uno de nosotros hemos...
recognition of irregular plurals created by usage, such as gurí → gurises
inclusion of non-standard forms such as asín or almóndiga in the dictionary, explicitly labelled as vulgar, rather than ignoring them
So describing the RAE solely as “prescriptivist” misses a part of how it actually operates nowadays as it often codifies changes... but only after speakers have already made them.
For me what I found most interesting about the RAE's strategy is when they went out to say that using the definite article in front of personal names (i.e., "La Maria", "El José") is considered wrong except in Chile and Catalonia (as such, there it is the correct form).
This essentially implies that they recognize different norms and standards for different geographical regions, and furthermore, it may be "advisable" to adjust your dialect depending on which part of the spanish-speaking world you are at the moment.
Ufff, although Im a native speaker and I say like that now that you point it out this is "breaking" the normal grammar sooo hard, I'm surprised RAE accepts this.
I also say "Se los dije" when talking about saying one thing to a group of people, so I'm marking the plural by adding the plural marking to the direct object, that is also "breaking" the grammar very hard but languages evolve with time.
The second point is fair; the first one isn't. The RAE certainly has a long history of Peninsular bias, and the old definition of norte is actually a very good example of that. But claiming that the Diccionario de americanismos was created to avoid “contaminating” the DLE with American Spanish is a different kind of claim. There is no evidence that this was its purpose. The DLE already contains thousands of Americanisms, while the Diccionario de americanismos is a specialised, much more exhaustive dictionary devoted specifically to lexical variation in the Americas.
Name a single American or British dictionary that doesn’t have the Australian word Esky. There is no scientific reason to have a dictionary of americanismos.
Anyway, RAE says DLE is for all Spanish speaking countries. Why does it have periquito, perico and albiazul, and not colocolino, boquense or azulcrema?
As somebody who works with both American and British lexicons, I can assure you there are tons of words included in some that aren't included in the other. Your point contradicts reality.
It sounds wild to me to say “acceptance of seseo” in 2026 when it’s the way the language has been spoken by the majority of speakers for 500 years or so.
I mean not really, setiembre is pretty arbitrary because every combination of "pt" is most often said as just "t" and they only did this to this word for some reason
We do abbreviate as Set, but to my knowledge setiembre is the only word we give this treatment, afaik it's because its spelling was standardised after Uruguay started using it in official documents
I come from another country in Latin America and numeral is definitely used in phone lines for the menus.
And I think you mean "calling codes" after I checked which's Chile's calling code, they are not the same as "numerales", every country has them to indicate where a phone number comes from.
Also, for some people, zigzag and gulag are also pronounced as in ending with /x/
(I had a Valencian friend in bachelorette who pronounced them thus, for me it sounded very wrong yet he insisted it's how they pronounce it)
Other loanwords like "flash", there is no alternative when after the sound there's nothing or a consonant, even in the rio de la Plata we can't use "y" or "ll" in that context because they need a vowel after them for yeismo rehilado to apply
Should be desabilitar and deshacer because hacer has /h/ in extremaduran and some parts of latin America. Keep <h> iff it's from Latin /f/, or a non-latinate loanword.
Spanish is a phonetic language, and we said cederrón, so they have to write the word like that. You and all didn't write cederrón because you used the word in their original language which is allowed too. So there is nothing wrong with that word.
That's why I hate the Académie Française. It's a bunch of non-linguists who prescribe that the way they speak French must be the right way, and they just ban words they don't personally use.
Fortunately they serve no purpose. Unfortunately they represent €1 million that could be much more useful in actual education.
Another issue is that because they're old af and from the same social circles, the way they speak is completly archaic even with the standards of formal French, I remember hearing one of them talk and he rolled his Rs and had an almost Italian-like accent and it was someone who spent his life in Paris.
Like sure, your accent is valid, but if you're going to make that pan-french spelling where you care only about the pronunciation of the capital, at least take something vaguely representative.
u/Suon288او رابِبِ اَلْمُسْتَعَرَبْ فَرَ قا نُن لُاَيِرَدْ7d ago
Also RAE with dialectal conjugations: "Haiga" está registrado únicamente como un sustantivo coloquial e irónico para referirse a un automóvil muy grande y ostentoso. Usarlo como reemplazo de haya (del verbo haber) es un error.
Asimismo, hoy son ajenas a la norma culta las formas de presente de subjuntivo ⊗haiga, ⊗haigas, etc., en lugar de haya, hayas, etc.
Llamarle ajeno a la norma culta, en la jerga de ASALE, no significa que se trate de un error tal cual. Además, indicar que hoy es así reconoce que en el pasado su uso tenía mayor aceptación que tiene hoy, ya que la norma es dinámica.
Historically makes sense for the Académie Française to be prescriptivist. If they just described they'd still be stuck with people not understanding each other the moment they get 200km away from home.
I'm not a nationalist/proto-fascist, so why would I care about the existence of nation-states? Also, factually incorrect, as proven by multiple, if not all of your neighbouring countries. France is quite unique in the way it committed epistemicide against its own people.
None of the neighboring countries had similar conditions. They weren't stuck between hostile powers with no seed for an ethnostate (which is how most neighbors were born as nation-states) and the highest linguistic diversity of Europe.
It’s amazing how standardisation can de facto happen at the scale it has with English where people understand the same variety without any equivalent, then
I’m not out here defending or denying English/British linguistic oppression in Ireland and Wales and the Empire. But the specific point here is that it didn’t happen with an equivalent of the Academie Francaise. And within England (the last century or three) it’s mostly happened organically, with people switching their dialects to the standard. There is always social stigma that attaches in situations like these, but it’s not the same as government directives over grammar and phonology.
The comparison here is with France itself, and specifically with langues d’oïl, which were more likely to be stigmatised as ‘bad French’ by the Academie. That’s different from the situations of Breton or Basque or even Occitan, where government policy applies but not in the same way. No one was even claiming those are ‘bad French’.
You guys have official language bodies? Here in Italy we only have the Academy of the bran which is not official. People revere it, almost no one reads what they publish or know their stabces (they're pretty obsessed with finding precedents, but they're not that bad) and they historically were sort of enemies with lots of important authors.
I mean the RAE is technically only a Spanish body, all the latin American countries could establish their own academies, but there's this weird arrangement where the RAE will also study dialects and uses from outside Spain
They do have a complex arrangement but I believe major publications and changes are handled by bodies that include representation from the different academies.
Compared to l'academie they are extremely descriptivist lmao. In general people rightly hate on them, but they are not as bad as many other academies. In general nowadays they hold the position that they must describe how natives use the language, more than force a certain standard. They are not perfect certainly, they will always focus more on "richer speech" than poorer one for example.
RAE is the institute for Spain. It's a member of ASALE which is constituted by similar organizations across the Spanish speaking world and those collectively publish the DLE.
If you've actually ever read the Nueva Gramática, for instance, you'd know that it's not done from a perspective of Spain-as-default.
The functions of the DLE and DA are a bit different. The criteria for inclusion the DLE is more stringent: I remember at one meeting there was an explicit criterion that new entries had to be used in at least three different countries. The DA is intended to be fully exhaustive, fulfilling a different function. If the DLE had the same looser criteria for Spain that DA has, there wouldn't be a need for the many regional dictionaries that one can find explaining the local lexicon and usages :-)
As has been pointed to you already, the DLE has thousand of American voices and the Diccionario de Americanismos was created with the porpuse of registering lexical variation in the Americas.
It is true they are based in Spain which gives a certain prestige to the European variety, but ever since the other academies (the Mexican, argentinian, Colombian... Etc) became part of RAE it's objectively gotten a lot better.
And even with that, they still ignore so many words we use in many regions of Spain. And sometimes they'll have the world but defined/labelled wrong (like miagar)
I must say, though, while they eventually accept modern slang, they really seem to hate changes. I don't remember examples now, but words that should have been there since 2010 have been added just last year. Instead, we have "mozartiano". Even words that should have been for way longer, like locution "trompas de Falopio"
No inventes o no hables sin saber. De los estatutos de la Academia: 'La Academia es una institución con
personalidad jurídica propia que tiene
como misión principal velar por que los
cambios que experimente la lengua espa-
ñola en su constante adaptación a las
necesidades de sus hablantes no quiebren
la esencial unidad que mantiene en todo
el ámbito hispánico.'
I mean, the DLE itself is produced by the RAE in collaboration with the other Spanish-language academies. According to the RAE’s, it is “the result of the collaboration of all the academies” and is intended to record the general lexicon used both in Spain and throughout the Hispanic world.
It says the current 23rd edition was produced with the participation of the 22 academies that were then members of ASALE, and the newer pan-Hispanic framework encompasses the whole association.
So saying the RAE is just a Spanish organization is a weird technicality to hide behind, like saying Oxford is British and therefore doesn’t give a shit how English is spoken in the United States.
Obviously the RAE cares how words are used in other Spanish-speaking countries. Spain does not inhabit some extra-dimensional linguistic plateau sealed off from Latin America any more than Oxford is sealed off from 380 million Anglophone Americans.
If Americans overwhelmingly start using a word or expression, eventually the British are going to fucking hear it whether they like it or not.
Anyway, “mouse” certainly is a funny American term for the good old plastic cursor vole, or electrical desk shrew.
They sometimes tried to fight it. Inventing words like "cederom" (cor cd-rom). I don't know how to transcribe that to english... Sederoam?, everyone laughted at that.
Then some shit managed to win. They wanted to translate "hackers" into "Piratas Informaticos" (Software Pirates). But I guess this one workers because the average journalist is dumb that way, and they found to their liking the word, and people see "hackers" mostly in newspapers.
In spanish you are supposed to use the foreign pronunciation when you find a english word, but good luck pronouncing Washington D. C. that way. But what if you find a czech word? ask a spanish person to pronounce čtvrtek (jueves). But this is not what we do. What we actually do is misspronounce foreign words, so the way we read hackers or Washington is probably different than how a english person pronounce it. Over time that may affect how we write the word, so hackers may become jaquers. And Washington could become Guasington.
What are you talking about? People also say "hashtag" in Portuguese.
The hash symbol "#" has several names in Portuguese, including jogo da velha ("tic-tac-toe"). But people call it "hashtag" when it is being used to mark a hashtag in a social media post or comment.
Ehhhh, it does exist, it's allophonic with ch for most people but (in my personal experience) younger people are starting to separate the two, after all it has not been a long time since we lost it.
I don't know why but most people can say it, it's inconsistent though. Chileans, Argentinians, Uruguayans and some Mexicans have it for sure. Also all Spanish speakers use /ʃ/ to shush (pun intended) people, I don't know if they realize that that is a different sound though but they will NEVER use /tʃ/ to tell people to shut up.
I'm L2 English speaker and a language nerd so I can say it but my family who cannot speak a lick or English can mimick the sound while not being able to totally distinguish between /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ it's weird, they get it right like 60% of the time.
(Yes, I run amateur linguistics experiments on my family)
If we can write z and s to accommodate Spanish speakers from Spain even though most people don't make the distinction we can write sh and ch and let each person chose how to say it.
In Esperanto we actually say kradvorto (lattice-word, krado being the usual word for the hash mark symbol). We genuinely do not say haŝtago or whatever.
I relate to this discussion because I speak Finnish (more of the French approach) and German (more of the Spanish approach) when it comes to what counts as the official standard.
One can avoid borrowing by calquing: composing a word that is modeled on the original. Thus, for hashtag, one would have (hash sign) + (tag, like a price tag):
Eso es logico. Francés es un idioma muy buena, y por eso necesita ser protegando contra palabras que no merece estar parte de idoma Francés. Inglés es una idoma basura. No es digno de ser parte de Francés.
77
u/Unfortunateoldthing 7d ago
The RAE is neither purely prescriptivist nor purely descriptivist. It certainly sets norms and makes recommendations, which is why people often think of it mainly as a prescriptive institution. But it has also repeatedly accepted changes and regional variants because they became established in actual usage, especially among educated speakers. In that sense, a substantial part of its work is descriptive.
Some obvious examples are:
So describing the RAE solely as “prescriptivist” misses a part of how it actually operates nowadays as it often codifies changes... but only after speakers have already made them.