In the present article we analyze, from the glottopolitical approach, the ideas of Rodolfo Lenz on the orthography of the Spanish language in the context of the struggle between the supporters of the Chilean reformed orthography and the adherents to the orthography of the Royal Spanish Academy, in the decade of 1890. Lenz is especially relevant in this context for being the most prominent figure of a paradigm by that time recently embedded in the Chilean cultural field: the science of language. We analyze a corpus of texts circumscribed to the 1890s, whose central or secondary theme is spelling and orthographic reform. In summary, we conclude that Lenz's defense of the Chilean reformed orthography, together with his criticism of the Royal Spanish Academy's spelling, are motivated first by the positivist scientificism, which articulates the modernizing policies that the Chilean nation-state sponsored for those years, together with being influenced by the awareness of facing a cultural problem in which tradition plays a central role.
Keywords:
glottopolitics, othography, orthographic reform, language ideology, Rudolf Lenz
Cáceres, V., & Rojas, D. (2019). Rudolf Lenz and the chilean orthographic reform: science, tradition and the politics of language. Boletín De Filología, 54(1), pp. 65–93. Retrieved from https://pedagogiaderecho.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/53529
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