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Strategic bivalency in Latin and Spanish in early modern Spain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2007

KATHRYN A. WOOLARD  and
E. NICHOLAS GENOVESE
KATHRYN A. WOOLARD
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0532, kwoolard@ucsd.edu
E. NICHOLAS GENOVESE
Affiliation:
Department of Classics and Humanities, San Diego State University, San Diego, California
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Abstract

This article examines a genre of literary texts in early modern Spain written to be readable in both Latin and Spanish. These texts provide explicit evidence of a phenomenon called “strategic bivalency.” They exemplify both the ideological erasure of language boundaries by experts and the purposeful mobilization of bivalent elements that belong simultaneously to two languages in contact. It is argued that by using such bivalency strategically, speakers and writers in contact zones create the effect of using two languages at once, and that this can be a political act. The texts examined here were composed to demonstrate the superiority of the Spanish language and thus to support Spanish political preeminence. The article addresses the import of the Latin-Spanish bivalent genre for language ideology and considers its implications for understanding of modern bivalent practices and of languages as discrete systems.An earlier version of this article was presented in March 2005 at the International Symposium on Bilingualism 5, in Barcelona. Woolard is grateful to the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain and to Joan Argenter, principal investigator, for partial support (grant #BFF2003-02954) of that presentation, as part of a project on “Codeswitching and culture in historical communities: Studies in historical linguistic ethnography.” Some of this material was also presented at the Joint XX Conference on Spanish in the U.S. and V Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages, in Chicago, March 2005. Woolard thanks the organizers of these events for the opportunity to discuss these ideas. Archival and library research was supported in part by the New Del Amo Foundation through the University of California and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which we gratefully acknowledge. Vincent Barletta and Monica Seefeldt assisted with bibliographic work. We are especially indebted to Roger Wright for helpful comments and sources. Thanks also to José del Valle, Narcís Figueras, Ricardo Otheguy, Barbara Johnstone, two anonymous reviewers, and a number of other scholars who kindly responded to queries. We are responsible for any errors and misconceptions that persist despite all this generous assistance.

Keywords

bilingualismbivalencylanguage contactlanguage ideologyearly modern SpainSpanishLatin
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , October 2007 , pp. 487 - 509
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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