Acceso usuarios
Dictionaries are lexical corpora that reflect the socio-cultural reality and power relations at the time of their publication. They provide information on how to use words and at the same time contain statements about individuals, ethnic groups or social classes who are supposed to use them. These kinds of judgments are known in sociolinguistics as linguistic attitudes, and dictionaries are a legitimate source for studying them, capable of providing new data and innovative methodological approaches. This paper studies linguistic attitudes in the Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739), which has not yet been analysed by our discipline. We will focus on negative attitudes represented by terms identified as “low social class”, “plebeian”, or “vulgar”. We will be interested in whether they refer to idiomatic registers, social classes or regional varieties of Spanish, and we will pay attention to the texts that refer to them. In the case of definitions without textual documentation, we will focus on patterns that may have influenced the lexicographers’ decisions and whether they may have been politically or ideologically motivated. As mentioned above, this work is a pioneering sociolinguistic study in the field of the Real Academia Española lexicography.
