Standard Spanish
Standard Spanish is a linguistic variety, or lect, of the Spanish language, dominantly used in its written form. There are different standard forms, including the Mexican standard, the Latin American standard, the Peninsular standard or European standard and the Rioplatense standard, in addition to the standard forms developed by international organizations and multinational companies. The term is often applied to standard Spanish. The RAE defines standard Spanish as the norm of cultivated, formal speech. Origins. Standard Spanish originated in the medieval Castilian dialect. In 1085, the Castilians conquered the city of Toledo, the traditional old capital of a  united peninsular kingdom in the Visigothic era. This city became the main center of the kingdom and the Christian Primate see, and it was there that an increasing new body of documents was written, not in official Latin, but in the local dialect, called "castellano" (Castilian). So, the written standard of Spanish started developing during the 12th century. The first steps toward standardization of Castilian were taken in the 13th century by King Alfonso X of Castile ("Alfonso, the Wise"), who assembled scribes and translators at his main court in Toledo. The king supervised the writings or even wrote some  documents himself, always trying to make sure that they were written in "castellano drecho" (correct Castilian). These included extensive works on history, astronomy, law, and other fields of knowledge, either composed originally or translated from Islamic sources. This body of writings contributed to the advancement of knowledge at the newly created universities in Europe that would lead to the early Renaissance forms during the Trecento. The first grammar of Castilian (or of any modern European language) was published in 1492 by Antonio de Nebrija. Further commentary on the language was offered by Juan de Valdés in 1535. In its earliest  documented form, and up through approximately the 15th century, the language used is customarily called Old Spanish. From approximately the 16th century on, it is called Modern Spanish. Because Old Spanish resembles the modern written language to a relatively high degree, a reader of Modern Spanish can learn to read medieval documents without much difficulty. After the settling of the Royal Court at Madrid, from the main one at Toledo and a few others, early in the 1600s the written language used among courtiers of all regional backgrounds in the peninsula was distilled into a common written form, which was  finally settled by the Royal Academy in the next century. The Spanish of the 16th and 17th centuries is sometimes called "classical" Spanish, referring to the literary accomplishments of that period. The old colonies and the Royal Spanish Academy. During the Spanish Empire, standard written Spanish was primarily based on the speech of Madrid, even though its origin is sometimes popularly assigned to other cities, such as Valladolid. In the Americas, Madrid quickly lost its influence over the spoken language. Even in the administrative centers of Lima and Mexico City the phonetics and the grammar of the American dialects were  notably different. Nonetheless, the situation was quite another for the written language, where variations are less prominent. For this greater stability in the written register, frequently cited causes are the early academic predominance of Peninsular universities and the centralization of administrative and legal authority in Spain during the colonial period. In 1713, with the foundation of the Royal Spanish Academy, part of the Academy's explicit purpose was the normalization of the language, "to fix the words and expressions of the Castilian language with the greatest possible propriety, elegance and purity". Throughout the 18th century the Academy developed means of  standardization. Between 1726 and 1793 it published a "dictionary of the Castilian language, in which the true sense of the words is explained, as well as their nature and quality, along with the phrases and forms of speech, and the proverbs, sayings, and other matters pertinent to the use of the language". In 1741 the Academy published an "Orthography of the Spanish Language", and in 1771 a "Grammar of the Spanish Language". The Spanish language words used in the Latin American countries began to be recorded in dictionaries as "Americanisms", beginning in the 19th century. Section::::"Cultural colonialism". During the 1880s , a new political situation and the intellectual independence of the former colonies drove the Real Academia Española to propose the formation of branch academies in the Spanish-speaking republics. The project encountered some opposition among local intellectuals. In Argentina, for example, Juan Antonio Argerich, suspecting an attempt by Spain at cultural restoration, argued in favor of an independent academy, one that would not be merely "a branch office, a servant to Spanish imperialism", and Juan María Gutiérrez rejected the naming of a correspondent. However, the proposal was finally accepted, eventually resulting in the founding of the Association of Spanish Language  Academies. The academies insisted on the preservation of a "common language", based on the upper-class speech of Spain and without regard for the strong influence that indigenous languages of the Americas and other European languages such as Italian, Portuguese, and English were having on the lexicon and even the grammar of American Spanish. That orientation persisted through the 20th century. A 1918 letter from Ramón Menéndez Pidal of the Real Academia Española to the American Association of Teachers of Spanish on the appearance of the first issue of its journal "Hispania" suggested: The priority of written language over spoken  language, and of Peninsular Spanish over American varieties, was the central thesis of Menéndez Pidal's letter. The "barbaric character of the American indigenous languages", in his opinion, should prevent them from having any influence over American Spanish. The tutorship of the Academy would take care of the rest. With that he was trying to counteract the prediction made by Andrés Bello in the prologue (p. xi) to his "Grammar" of 1847, which warned of the profusion of regional varieties that would "flood and cloud much of what is written in America, and, altering the structure of the language, tend  to make it into a multitude of irregular, licencious, barbarian dialects". According to this interlocking linguistic and political viewpoint, only the unity of the "educated" language would guarantee the unity of the Hispanic world. On the other hand, the Colombian philologist Rufino José Cuervo—who shared Bello's prognosis of the eventual fragmentation of Spanish into a plurality of mutually unintelligible languages (although unlike Bello he celebrated it)—warned against the use of the written medium to measure the unity of the language, considering it a "veil that covers local speech". This issue was documented poignantly in the 1935 treatise by  Amado Alonso entitled "El problema de la lengua en América" (The problem of language in [Spanish] America), and was reiterated in 1941 when the scholar Américo Castro published "La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense y su sentido histórico" (The linguistic peculiarity of River Plate Spanish and its historical significance). For writers of this viewpoint, the drift away from educated Castilian language was an unmistakable sign of social decay. Castro declared that the peculiarities of Argentine Spanish, especially the voseo, were symptoms of "universal plebeianism", "base instincts", "inner discontent, [and] resentment upon thinking about submitting to any moderately arduous rule". According to Castro 's diagnosis, the strong identity of the Buenos Aires dialect was due to the general acceptance of popular forms at the expense of educated ones. Castro worries above all about the impossibility of immediately perceiving the social class of the speaker from the traits of his speech. The lack of the "checks and inhibitions" that the upper classes should represent seemed to him an unmistakable sign of social decay. Castro's text is typical of a widespread view that sees the unity of language as the guardian of national unity, and the upper classes as the guardians of language orthodoxy . Much of Menéndez Pidal's work is aimed at pursuing that goal, recommending greater zeal in the persecution of "incorrect" usage through "the teaching of grammar, doctrinal studies, dictionaries, the dissemination of good models, [and] commentary on the classical authors, or, unconsciously, through the effective example that is propagated through social interaction and literary creation". This kind of classist centralism—common to other colonial languages, especially French—has had lasting influence on the use and teaching of the language. Only recently have some regional varieties (such as voseo in Argentina) become part of formal education and of the literary language —the latter, thanks largely to the literary naturalism of the mid-20th century. Present-day issues. The question of standard language took on new relevance with the rise of the mass media, when, for the first time, speakers of different dialects gained immediate access—by radio, television, and, more recently, the Internet—to language from regions speaking a variety different from their own. The weakness of the standard form's influence on spoken language had made standardization a marginal issue in the past, but it now became an important subject for debate. The lasting influence of linguistic centralism has led some  commentators to claim that the problem of fragmentation is non-existent, and that it is enough simply to emulate educated language. One author, for example, repeated the doctrine of Menéndez Pidal when stating that In any event, in the sphere of spoken language the issue has become problematic since at least the 1950s, when the commercial demands on movie dubbing studios working with Hollywood films began to call for the development of a Spanish whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical features would not be recognizable as belonging to any particular country. This goal soon proved to be an elusive one: even  if the results could, on occasion, approximate a universally intelligible form, at the same time the process prevented the transmission of a familiar, intimate, or everyday tone. Nevertheless, its continued use has produced a degree of familiarization with a certain abstract phonetics throughout Spanish America. Dubbings made in Spain, are very particularly localized. At the First , held in 1997 in Zacatecas, Mexico, controversy emerged around the concept of Standard Spanish. Some authors, such as the Spanish writer , advocated defining a "common Spanish", composed of the lowest common denominator of most dialects. Others, such as the journalist (director of Radio Exterior  de España), denied the existence of a problem and expressed the idea of the supposed superiority of educated Castilian Spanish over dialects with more influence from other languages. Finally, experts from the Americas such as Lila Petrella stated that a neutral Spanish language could possibly be developed for use in purely descriptive texts, but that the major variations among dialects with regard to semantics and pragmatics would imply that it is impossible to define a single standard variety that would have the same linguistic value for all Spanish-speakers. Above all, certain grammatical structures are impossible to form in a  neutral way, due to differences in the verb conjugations used (e.g. the use of the second-person familiar pronoun "vos" in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Central American countries, while most other countries prefer "tú", and most Colombians tend to use "usted" in the informal context—and all three pronouns require different verb conjugations). At least one of the three versions will always sound odd in any given Spanish-speaking country. Given that a neutral Spanish for all Spanish-speakers is impossible, there are four established standardized "Spanishes" used in translations and, more recently, in film-dubbing by some companies: (1 ) Castilian or Peninsular Spanish for Spain; (2) River Plate Spanish for Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina (using "voseo"); (3) Mexican Spanish for the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America (even though this last region is largely "voseante"), and the rest of Spanish-speaking America); (4) the Spanish of international organisations like the United Nations, the Organisation of American States and their respective specialised bodies. In the television market, Spanish-speaking America is considered as one territory for distribution and syndication of programmes; for this reason they are dubbed into a Neutral Spanish that avoids idioms and words that may have a  coarse meaning in any of the countries in which the programme will be shown. This American Neutral Spanish: American Neutral Spanish tends to be common in Colombia (because of the existence of a lot of regional dialects), Venezuela (because of its location as a crossroad for Spanish-speaking America and an important Spanish-language soap opera production industry) and Mexico, where most of the mass media is made. American Neutral or Mexican Spanish was also formerly distributed with TV shows and movies in Spain, particularly U.S. dubbed cartoons, until it was replaced by local dubs in the 1990s. Another motivator  for the unification of Spanish is the translation by multinational companies of manuals, software, websites, etc., from English to Spanish. It is easier to use a neutral version of Spanish than to create different versions for each country or region. If it were done by country, there would be over twenty versions, and if by region it would be difficult to define which countries belonged to which region, as well as being complicated from the logistical point of view. The result has been to identify a neutral Spanish, a version that tries to avoid regional phenomena, such as the Spanish -speaking American voseo, or terms that may be identified with specific countries (for example, for “computer”, the term in Spanish-speaking America is ', except in a few areas that prefer ', while in Spain the most frequent term is '; as a result, Microsoft Windows uses the region-neutral term ', meaning "equipment"). This neutral language is developed with the help of glossaries that prescribe the preferred terms and the terms to avoid. It is a common occurrence in the computing field, because it lowers production costs.