Centers of linguistic prestige in the Spain of Golden Age: rethinking the question

Abstract

This study looks at three centres of linguistic prestige (Toledo, Madrid and Seville). For the most part, it employs the concept of overt prestige to explicate, for instance, the speed with which a new linguistic norm establishes itself in post-1561 Madrid, as well as to shed light on the outcome of the struggle waged in the New World between the latter and the speech of Seville. The main conclusions reached are: (1) that there is reason to suppose that the new Madrid prestige norm is really the Valladolid courtly norm uprooted and transplanted when Philip II decides to make Madrid the permanent seat o f his court; and (2) that the Castilian spoken by educated Sevillians enjoys overt prestige and, therefore, that the competition between Madrid and Seville speech playing out in the vice-royalties of the New World is largely a struggle between two types of Castilian, both of which enjoy prestige. In other words, recognizing that the speech of educated Sevillians has overt prestige allows us to clarify aspects of the linguistic situation emerging in the New World that social dialectology and geo-biography have left unexplained.