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HISPANISMO. WHAT’S IN A NAME? In 1732, the inaugural edition of the Real Academia Española’s (RAE) Diccionario de la lengua castellana defined Hispanismo in straightforward linguistic terms as a “modo de hablar particular y privativo de la lengua española: como entendido por hombre que entiende.” Hispanismo was translated into English as “Spanicism” by Pedro Pineda in his Spanish–English and English–Spanish Dictionary of 1740; by 1803 RAE’s dictionary, though continuing to define Hispanismo as a “modo de hablar peculiar de la lengua española,” added that it was also a word or phrase “que se aparta de las reglas comunes de la gramática. Idiotismus hispanicus.” Later in the century, however, these pejorative associations were dropped, and in the 1884 edition of that same dictionary, Hispanismo remained a linguistic term with three distinctive meanings: (1) “Giro o modo de hablar propio y privativo de la lengua española”; (2) “Vocablo o giro de esta lengua empleado en otra”; and (3) “Empleo de vocablo o giros españoles en distinto idioma.” These same definitions still appear in the most recent edition of the RAE’s Diccionario de la lengua española, complemented by a fourth: “Dedicación al estudio de las lenguas, literaturas o cultura hispánicas,” suggesting something tantamount to a scholarly discipline.
This entry, though accurate, fails to reference the ideological meanings currently attached to Hispanismo owing to its associations with hispanidad, another linguistic term, albeit one that by early twentieth century had acquired racial overtones evoking Spanishness, an inherited trait that supposedly united Spanish speakers around the world. Hispanidad officially acquired a public face when, in 1918, Spain’s king Alonso XIII proclaimed 12 October a national holiday to be known as “Día de la Raza,” taking advantage of the longstanding association of this day with Columbus’s first landfall in in the Americas. That particular designation continued until 1958, when Francisco Franco’s government, in keeping with this dictator’s long-standing efforts to exalt Spain’s imperial and cultural legacy in Spanish America, renamed it “Día de la Hispanidad,” though in 1987, the name was changed again to [End Page 161] “Fiesta Nacional de España.” For some the concept of Hispanidad is also integral to the programs and language classes sponsored by the Spanish government’s Instituto Cervantes and its outposts around the world. For this reason, Hispanism—sometimes also referred to as Pan-Hispanism—has evolved into something of a political football, a topic of seemingly endless discussion and debate with its harshest critics regarding it as nothing less than a neo-imperialist ideology whose usage and rapid extinction they heartily recommend.
A succinct introduction to these controversies can be found in Hispanismo’s introduction by the volume’s editor Antonio Niño, a historian best known for his pioneering monograph, Cultura y diplomacia: los hispanistas franceses y España, 1875–1931 (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas – Casa de Velázquez, 1988). But rather than allow himself and this collection of essays to get bogged down in this ideological morass, Niño wisely examines Hispanism as a “categoría científica,” or academic discipline. Towards this end he explains that the volume’s primary purpose is to document various iterations of the discipline’s development in various countries, a phenomenon labeled “international Hispanism,” basically a transnational approach to a field with a complex and changing history.
In keeping with this transnational theme, Jean-François Botrel’s essay (“Las asociaciones nacionales e internacionales de hispanistas y el fomento del hispanismo científico”) offers a detailed account examining Hispanism’s development as reflected in the creation of “associations” of card-carrying hispanistas in countries around the world. With their origins in the Société Académique Franco-Hispano-Portugaise (1879) and the American Association of the Teachers of Spanish (1917; hereafter AATS), the number of these associations mushroomed in the decades after World War II, with 1955 marking the creation of the Association of Hispanists in Great Britain & Ireland and a similar organization in Japan. The most recent creation is the Asocación Taiwanesa de Hispanistas established in 2021. While these associations speak directly to the...
