“No se dice”: The ANLE and U.S. Spanish

There are 24 Academies of the Spanish Language in the world. One of the youngest is the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, or ANLE, founded in 1973.

In 2010, the ANLE released a book titled Hablando bien se entiende la gente.  The lead co-editor was Gerardo Piña-Rosales, then-director of the ANLE. 

In March 2014, my colleague Dr. Andrew Lynch (University of Miami) and I published a response to this book in the journal Hispania. We criticized the book for its lack of sociolinguistic principles and its potentially negative impact on the linguistic self-esteem of U.S. Spanish-speakers. 

The publication date of our article happened to coincide with the release of the ANLE's second volume, Hablando bien se entiende la gente 2.  At this time, I wrote two reviews on Amazon expression my opinion of both of these books: 

The two reviews were more or less the same, because the second volume appeared to me to be more of the same that had been published in the first volume. To be fair, however, the negative tone was softened in the second volume.

Several responses to my review began appearing on Amazon. Some agreed with my position:

This one came later:

Others did not. Here is a particularly vehement review. Notice that the name of Gerardo Piña-Rosales, then-director of the ANLE, appears at the beginning of the review, but the name of Professor Eduardo González Viaña appears at the end. Curiously, it lists González Viaña’s affiliation as Oregon State University when he was in fact affiliated with Western Oregon University. This suggests that González Viaña did not in fact write the review and someone else wrote it and used his name; evidence points to Piña-Rosales. In any case, this review disappeared from the Amazon website two days after it was published. 

I also received a copy Hablando bien se entiende la gente 2 in the mail with this post-it note “thanking me for my interest in their publications:”

In September 2014, Piña-Rosales published in Hispania his response to the Lynch & Potowski (2014) article. He accuses us of lacking a sense of humor, suffering from paranoia, ignorance of U.S. history, being too politically correct, and lacking professional ethics.  He also declares our analysis "burdo y cerril" (crude, clumsy). 

I invite readers to consult these original texts and decide for themselves the merits of our sociolinguistic analysis, as well as the professional ethics exhibited in the Amazon reviews posted above as well as in Piña-Rosales’ response in Hispania.