Acceso usuarios
Madrid, España
From the point of view of a language purist, the presence of indigenous terms in Latin American Spanish is a very important dilemma, since they can be seen as a problem for the unity of the Spanish language, but at the same time they are also part of the national identity of the Central American people. In this sense, the aim of this paper is to describe the difficult and paradoxical attitude that Antonio Batres Jáuregui shows towards these words in his Vicios del lenguaje y provincialismos de Guatemala (Guatemala City, 1892). Thus, we will proceed to analyse the value judgments that he exposes in his dictionary, in order to detect the ideologems that define his linguistic thoughts. The results show that Batres Jáuregui’s thinking about indigenous terms is highly complex and ambiguous, so that he does not appear to be the linguistic purist that he has been portrayed in the academic literature.
