costa rica language academy
A book that explores the characteristics the Spanish spoken by Costa Ricans won the award from the Costa Rican Language Academy (ACL) for 2009.
The research into El español de costa rica según los ticos (Costa Rican Spanish According to Ticos), by linguist Carla Victoria Jara, voices the views of Costa Ricans on the alternatives that are made in the country with respect to our mother tongue. The announcement of the winning entry was made on Monday during the inauguration of the first Festival of Costa Rican writers.
The book deals specifically with popular language in that it develops a systematic study of the views that the common speaker has on the language.
“It is not a book about the particularities of Costa Rican Spanish as described by professional linguists, but a study on opinions about what is spoken in our own community,” wrote the author in the preface of the book.
The study shows that Costa Ricans perceive the Spanish of Costa Rica as a degraded form of real Spanish or the language spoken in Spain.
“Traditional normative attitudes that condemn popular uses and defends an ideal state of a language in its purity and perfection is a phenomenon that occurs everywhere,” highlighted Jara.
For example, one respondent believes that Spanish is not spoken well in Costa Rica because “we conjugate verbs badly, have bad pronunciation, do not pause when speaking, do not breathe well and use anglicized words.
According to the study, some Costa Ricans attribute variants in the speech to extra-linguistic factors such as differences in social class, geographical origin of the speaker, age and the influence of other languages like English.
“No matter where it is spoken, it is always Spanish, only with some modifications depending on the culture and customs of each region, but I think we are killing more of our language with useless, anglicized words that do not do us any favors,” said another one of the persons consulted. The book also provides specific recommendations by the Spanish speakers from Costa Rica themselves to correct the errors.
The ACL 2009 award was convened for works in philology, linguistics and literary studies published between 2004 and 2008.
The book El español de Costa Rica según los ticos (The Spanish of Costa Rican according to Ticos) was published in 2006 by University Editorial of Costa Rica.
ACL members based their decision on the fact that this is the first research conducted in the country within the field of folk linguistics. Jara is a teacher and lecturer at the School of Philology, Linguistics and Literature at the University of Costa Rica, and author of several books on the Bribri language. If you are from Costa Rica and are interested in finding out what others feel about the Spanish we speak, you should go out and buy this book.
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Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – In Costa Rica, We Speak Spanish Poorly
Costa Rican Language Academy CRLA