The Fundéu BBVA (formerly The Foundation of Urgent Spanish) is a non-profit organization created in February 2005 in Madrid, Spain. The Foundation was created in collaboration with the Real Academia Española, and is founded under the Department of Urgent Spanish of Agencia EFE. It took its new name Fundéu BBVA in 2008.
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The foundation, in the words of its president, director of la Real Academia Española, Víctor García de la Concha, “is a fundamental step towards the unity of the language, it collaborates for the compliance of its objectives with all those institutions related to the defense of Spanish”. The main responsibility of the Foundation is to maintain the unity and “purity” of the Spanish language. Other primary main objectives of the Foundation include:
The Manual of Urgent Spanish is an important tool in maintaining the purity of the Spanish language. It is also responsible for clearing up any misunderstandings pertaining to the Spanish language. One of the latest preoccupations of the Manual has been to proscribe Spanglish words and phrases that have begun to influence the language. An example from the Manual reads:
Jugar un papel – la locución jugar un papel aparece con bastante frecuencia en las noticias y se emplea cada vez más en el español tanto escrito como hablado, sin tener en cuenta que no es correcta… Entre las dieciocho acepciones que tiene el verbo jugar en español, no hay ninguna que autorice la expresión jugar un papel anglo-galicismo que tiene sus raíces en el ingles “to play a role” y en el francés “jouer un rôle”… Jugar un papel en el sentido de “desempeñar una función”, “cumplir con una misión o encargo”, “estar de acuerdo con la posición”… es traducción servil y locución tan inadmisible y ajena a nuestra lengua como lo sería decir “jugar una comedia” (to play a comedy) o “jugar al piano” (to play the piano).
The manual also clears up any misinterpretations of how proper Spanish would utilize diverse linguistic aspects, such as pronunciation, orthography, and punctuation. For example, in regards to “el seseo” and “el ceceo” (the varying regionalistic ways that the letters ‘s’, ‘c’ and ‘z’ may be pronounced), the Manual of Urgent Spanish says:
[E]l seseo, es decir, la pronunciación de las letras c y z como s, es característico de algunas zonas meridionales de la Península, de las islas Canarias y de América. Esta pronunciación está admitida por la norma culta. No así el ceceo (pronunciación de la s como z).
The Foundation of Urgent Spanish has recently (2008) launched Wikilengua, a wiki which serves as a resource tool of the recognized use of Spanish. With the contribution of the Spanish community, frequent doubts can be consulted and corrected by using the Wikilengua webpage. Being open and accessible to everyone, Wikilengua may also serve as a medium to reflect the diversity and richness of Spanish in its multiple varieties spoken in more than twenty-one countries.
Wikilengua is open and free of charge for reading and contributing. Wikilengua is constructed and grows around a community of authors, translators, editors, linguists, professors, students, journalists, and in general all people who are interested in Spanish, individually or as part of some entity, that would like to share their knowledge with hundreds of millions of other Spanish-speakers.
Wikilengua is licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA.
Morales, Humberto Lopez. Globalizacion Del Lexico Hispanico. Madrid: Espasa Calpe Mexicana, S.A., 2007.