Royal Spanish Academy

For the fine arts academy, see Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.

Royal Spanish Academy

Real Academia Española
Arms of the Royal Spanish Academy
Abbreviation	RAE
Motto	Limpia, fija y da esplendor ("It purifies, it fixes, and it dignifies")
Formation	1713 (1713)
Founder	The Duke of Escalona
Purpose	Linguistic prescription and research
Headquarters	Madrid, Spain
Region served	Hispanophone regions and populations
Official language	Spanish
Director	Santiago Muñoz Machado
Main organ	Junta de Gobierno
Affiliations	Association of Spanish Language Academies
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The Royal Spanish Academy (Spanish: Real Academia Española, generally abbreviated as RAE) is Spain's official royal institution with a mission to ensure the stability of the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, and is affiliated with national language academies in 22 other Hispanophone nations through the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. The RAE's emblem is a fiery crucible, and its motto is Limpia, fija y da esplendor ("It purifies, it fixes, and it dignifies").

The RAE dedicates itself to language planning by applying linguistic prescription aimed at promoting linguistic unity within and between various territories, to ensure a common standard. The proposed language guidelines are shown in a number of works.

History

File:Limpia, Fija y Da Esplendor Detalle Grabado Lema Real Academia Española de la Lengua - AHG.jpg

RAE motto from the title page of one of its publications.

File:Madrid, inauguración del nuevo edificio de la Real Academia Española. Alrededores del edificio a la llegada de SS. MM..jpg

Inauguration of the RAE building in Madrid by Alfonso XIII, 1894

Title page of Fundación y estatútos de la Real Académia Españóla (Foundation and statutes of the Royal Spanish Academy) (1715)

The Royal Spanish Academy was founded in 1713, modeled after the Accademia della Crusca (1582), of Italy, and the Académie Française (1635), of France, with the purpose "to fix the voices and vocabularies of the Spanish language with propriety, elegance, and purity". King Philip V approved its constitution on 3 October 1714, placing it under the Crown's protection.

Its aristocratic founder, Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco, Duke of Escalona and Marquess of Villena, described its aims as "to assure that Spanish speakers will always be able to read Cervantes" – by exercising a progressive up-to-date maintenance of the formal language.

The RAE began establishing rules for the orthography of Spanish beginning in 1741 with the first edition of the Ortographía (spelled Ortografía from the second edition onwards). The proposals of the Academy became the official norm in Spain by royal decree in 1844, and they were also gradually adopted by the Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. Several reforms were introduced in the Nuevas Normas de Prosodia y Ortografía (1959, New Norms of Prosody and Orthography). Since the establishment of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language in 1951, the Spanish academy works in close consultation with the other Spanish language academies in its various works and projects. The 1999 Orthography was the first to be edited by the twenty two academies together. The current rules and practical recommendations on spelling are presented in the latest edition of the Ortografía (2010).

The headquarters, opened in 1894, is located at Calle Felipe IV, 4, in the ward of Jerónimos, next to the Museo del Prado. The Center for the Studies of the Royal Spanish Academy, opened in 2007, is located at Calle Serrano 187–189.

Fundamentals

According to Salvador Gutiérrez, an academic numerary of the institution, the Academy does not dictate the rules but studies the language, collects information and presents it. The rules of the language are simply the continued use of expressions, some of which are collected by the Academy. Although he also says that it is important to read and write correctly. Article 1 of the statutes of the Royal Spanish Academy, translated from Spanish, says the following:

The Academy is an institution with legal personality whose main mission is to ensure that the changes experienced by the Spanish language in its constant adaptation to the needs of its speakers do not break the essential unity it maintains throughout the Hispanic world. It must equally ensure that this evolution preserves the characteristic nature of the language, as gradually consolidated over the centuries, as well as establishing and disseminating the criteria for its proper and correct use, and contributing to its splendor.

To achieve these ends, it shall study and promote the study of the history and present of Spanish, it shall disseminate the writings, literary—especially classics—and non-literary, that it deems important for the knowledge of such matters, and will seek to keep alive the memory of those who, in Spain or in the Americas, have cultivated our language with glory.

As a member of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, it shall maintain a special relation with the corresponding and associated academies.

Composition

Main article: List of members of the Real Academia Española

File:Biblioteca de la RAE.jpg

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Members of the Academy are known as Académicos de número (English: Academic Numerary), chosen from among prestigious people within the arts and sciences, including several Spanish-language authors, known as The Immortals (Spanish: Los Inmortales), similarly to their French Academy counterparts. The numeraries (Spanish: Números) are elected for life by the other academicians. Each academician holds a seat labeled with a letter from the Spanish alphabet, although upper and lower case letters denote separate seats.

File:Países con Academia de la Lengua Española.svg

Countries with a Spanish language academy

The Academy has included Latin American members from the time of Rafael María Baralt, although some Spanish-speaking countries have their own academies of the language.

Current members

letter	name	year
O	Pere Gimferrer Torrens	1985
p	Francisco Rico Manrique	1987
c	Víctor García de la Concha	1992
l	Emilio Lledó Íñigo	1994
C	Luis Goytisolo Gay	1995
L	Mario Vargas Llosa	1996
u	Antonio Muñoz Molina	1996
V	Juan Luis Cebrián Echarri	1997
t	Ignacio Bosque Muñoz	1997
ñ	Luis María Anson Oliart	1998
I	Luis Mateo Díez Rodríguez	2001
N	Guilermo Rojo Sánchez	2001
k	José Antonio Pascual Rodríguez	2002
E	Carmen Iglesias Cano	2002
T	Arturo Pérez-Reverte Gutiérrez	2003
G	José Manuel Sánchez Ron	2003
j	Álvaro Pombo y García de los Ríos	2004
o	Antonio Fernández Alba	2006
h	José Manuel Blecua Perdices	2006
a	Pedro García Barreno	2006
S	Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez	2008
D	Darío Villanueva Prieto	2008
m	José María Merino	2009
g	Soledad Puértolas Villanueva	2010
P	Inés Fernández-Ordóñez Hernández	2011
Q	Pedro Álvarez de Miranda de la Gándara	2011
e	Juan Gil Fernández	2011
f	José B. Terceiro Lomba	2012
r	Santiago Muñoz Machado	2013
b	Miguel Sáenz Sagaseta de Ilúrdoz	2013
n	Carme Riera Guilera	2013
Z	José Luis Gómez García	2014
B	Aurora Egido Martínez	2014
F	Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón	2016
H	Félix de Azúa Comella	2016
U	Clara Janés Nadal	2016
s	María Paz Battaner Arias	2017
J	Carlos García Gual	2019
M	Juan Mayorga	2019
K	José María Bermúdez de Castro	2022
i	Paloma Díaz-Mas	2022
d	Dolores Corbella	2023
q	Asunción Gómez-Pérez	2023

File:Real Academia Española (25214072243).jpg

View of the front facade of the RAE building

Notable past academicians

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• Niceto Alcalá-Zamora
• Vicente Aleixandre
• Dámaso Alonso
• "Azorín"
• Vicente Bacallar y Sanna
• Pío Baroja
• Jacinto Benavente
• Carlos Bousoño
• Manuel Bretón de los Herreros
• Camilo José Cela
• Miguel Delibes
• José Echegaray
• Wenceslao Fernández Flórez
• Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos
• Antonio Machado
• Salvador de Madariaga
• Julián Marías
• Francisco Martínez de la Rosa
• Ramón Menéndez Pidal
• Armando Palacio Valdés
• José María de Pereda
• Benito Pérez Galdós
• Manuel José Quintana
• Gonzalo Torrente Ballester
• Juan Valera
• José Zorrilla

Publications

Joint publications of the RAE and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language

• Diccionario de la lengua española (Spanish Language Dictionary). The 1st edition was published in 1780, the 22nd edition in 2001 and the 23rd edition in 2014, which since 2001 can be consulted online for free as of October 2017 and was published in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries to mark the tricentennial of the founding of the RAE.
  • The Diccionario esencial de la lengua española (Essential Dictionary of the Spanish Language) was published in 2006 as a compendium of the 22nd edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish Language.
• Ortografía de la lengua española (Spanish Language Orthography). The 1st edition was published in 1741 and the latest edition in 2010. The edition of 1999 was the first spelling book to cover the whole Hispanic world, replacing the Nuevas normas de prosodia y ortografía (New Rules for Prosody and Spelling) of 1959.
• Nueva gramática de la lengua española (New Spanish Language Grammar, 1st edition: 1771, latest edition: 2009). The latest edition is the first grammar to cover the whole Hispanic world, replacing the prior Gramática de la lengua española (Grammar of the Spanish Language, 1931) and the Esbozo de una Nueva gramática de la lengua española (Outline of a New Grammar of the Spanish Language, 1973). The Nueva gramática de la lengua española is available in 3 different versions: The Edición completa (Complete Edition) includes 3,800 pages in two volumes to describe morphology and syntax (published December 4, 2009) plus a third volume of phonetics and phonology and a DVD (early 2010).
  • The Manual edition is a single 750-page volume, which was presented at the 5th Congress of the Spanish Language which convened virtually in Valparaíso, Chile, due to the earthquake, and was released on April 23, 2010.
  • The Gramática básica (Basic Grammar) is a 305-page volume directed to people who received secondary education, and which can be adaptable for school use; it was first published in 2011.
  • The RAE has also published two other works by individual editors: Gramática de la lengua española (Grammar of the Spanish Language, by Emilio Alarcos Llorach, 1994) and Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (Descriptive Grammar of the Spanish Language, 3 volumes, directed by Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte, 1999).
• Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts, 1st edition: 2005). Resolves doubts related to the use of the Spanish language. Can be consulted online since 2006.
• Diccionario del estudiante (Student's Dictionary, 1st edition: 2005). Directed to students in secondary education between 12 and 18 years-old.
  • Diccionario práctico del estudiante (Student's Practical Dictionary, 1st edition: 2007) is an adapted version for Latin America of the Student's Dictionary.
• Diccionario de americanismos (Dictionary of Americanisms) is a listing of Spanish language terms of the Americas and their meaning. First edition published in 2010.

See also

• List of language regulators
• Paloma Chen