La nouvelle politique panhispanique des Académies de la langue espagnole : une question de « frontières »

The motto chosen by the Spanish Real Academy (Real Academia Española, RAE) since 1715, « limpia, fija y da splendor », unequivocally shows what has been a long term concern for the last three centuries: set the standard and promote a given language. Having long favoured the cultivated Spanish model from the Northern and Central Peninsula —at the expense of the Southern peninsular practices and especially the American ones—, the RAE has chosen since 1999 to implement a real ideological watershed by engaging in collective work with the other 21 academies of the Spanish language in order to promote a « polycentric norm », as part of a « panhispanic language policy ». Even if the intention seems laudable, what about the achievement of this goal? Can the latest publications, in particular the imposing Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española [NGLE], be read as the implementation of the rhetoric that the RAE keeps hammering in its prologues? After presenting the panhispanic discourse by situating it in a broader context, we will set it against the reality of grammatical analyzes in the NGLE by focusing on two particularly significant phenomena, where the gap between American and European practices slightly widens: the « sequence of tenses » and the « compound tenses », with the particular example of the pluperfect.