Major Milestones in the Lexical Renewal of Spanish

Abstract

This paper seeks to establish that the major changes in the history of the Spanish lexical system form part of discursive constructions that emerged from new ideologies in various orders of social reality. Language, immersed in that reality, has been, and still is, a faithful reflection of processes of change in mentality, which it expresses through a distinct lexical-grammatical style, setting renewed modalities of verbal transaction into play.

The transformations of the lexical body of Spanish accompanied the political and cultural vicissitudes of the Western Christian world. With the arrival of the Spanish conqueror in these lands, the first version of what we today call globalization took place from a geographical, political-economic, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural point of view. The globalized lexicon was the result of a double-edged linguistic force.

The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century exerted pressure on Spanish, as on the other known languages, to unify and globalize the designations of new products, thereby favoring their international circulation. Finally, at the turn of the millennia, cultural globalization and technological determinism have transformed our mentalities; our communicational codes now require lexical forms better adjusted to new cognitive dimensions and to other social demands.

Approaching this renewed lexicon presupposes the existence of groups of specialists in innovative domains, possessing sufficient denominative expertise to make a lexical selection useful for the development of processes of receptive comprehension and of discursive production capable of disseminating the prevailing changes in mentality.