Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

CULTURE: Safeguarding Spanish in the Age of the Internet

Maricel Drazer

ROSARIO, Argentina, Nov 22 2004 (IPS) - Does the fact that cyberspace is full of ignorant people mean that ignorance should be accepted as the new norm? If millions of people speak their own language poorly, and their writing is even worse, should we simply sit back and witness the "downward democratisation" of a "dumbing down" of society?

These provocative questions were posed by Argentine writer Mempo Giardinelli at the 3rd International Congress of the Spanish Language, which wrapped up this weekend in Rosario, Argentina.

Giardinelli’s questions were intended to serve as a warning about the deterioration of the Spanish language in the Internet age, as well as a call to take action.

"The main issue is the growing disregard for proper spelling and grammar in communications today, particularly in so-called cyberspace," he said.

His concerns were echoed by Fernando Iwasaki, a Peruvian essayist now living in Spain. "It worries me that dictionaries are being replaced by Internet search engines," he said. "When people want to know something, they go straight to Google," he added, referring to one of the most popular research tools on the "worldwide web".

The Internet has not only changed the way we look for information. It has also altered the way people write and read, and even created new forms of interpersonal relationships, like "chatting", when two or more people engage in "conversations" conducted completely by computer, over the Internet, explained Rafael Santos Calderón, editor-in-chief of the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo.

"It’s amazing the way these kids express themselves, at the speed of light, using abbreviations that are completely incomprehensible to other people," he told IPS.

"During the short time I’ve been exposed to MSN Messenger (one of the most popular Internet chat programs), I’ve come to the conclusion that these kids are speaking Mandarin. I genuinely do not understand the Spanish they are speaking, and quite frankly, I’m not even sure if it is Spanish," he added.

Although the Congress participants were referring specifically to the Spanish language, their comments on the development of a whole new set of rules, usages and abbreviations that are specific to "messaging" – and practically indecipherable to outsiders – could just as easily apply to English and a number of other languages.

"I had begun to spend a fair amount of time in ‘chat rooms’ at one point, but I am simply incapable of writing without commas and periods and accents, it’s just beyond me, and so after about 10 minutes, someone would always say, ‘Be careful, there’s a psycho in here,’ and I would have to exit," Spanish writer Juan José Millás joked during a panel session.

"These are massively used and enormously influential technologies," Millás later told IPS, "and they are consciously degrading the language, because you’re expected to write completely in lower-case letters and with everything run together, without punctuation, which encourages a deterioration of the language, and therefore a deterioration of thought."

Giardinelli concurred. "A community that knows and speaks its language well is better able to express its desires and perfect its actions, and can also assimilate the contributions of other languages and new technologies without risk," he said.

In the case of new technologies, they are usually "christened" in the language spoken by those who create them, which means that Spanish is often obliged to accept words originally coined in English and thus converted into Anglicisms.

In spite of this, Tomas Eloy Martínez, an Argentine writer based in the United States, told IPS that the Spanish language is "strong", and it’s survival is not endangered.

Peruvian writer and university professor Alfredo Bryce Echenique, for his part, downplayed the ominous predictions of those who believe that books will become extinct as a result of new information and communications technologies.

"You have to take these things in stride, just like when the printing press was invented. There are always people predicting ‘the end’, like ‘the end of live theatre’ after the birth of motion pictures, and nevertheless, it’s still here," he added.

The discussion of the Internet and its effects on the Spanish language will undoubtedly continue at the 4th International Congress, scheduled to take place in Colombia in 2007.

In the meantime, Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer José Saramago left the participants of this year’s congress with a comforting thought.

"You can shed tears over the pages of a book, but not over a computer screen," he declared.