The plenary session of the Royal Spanish Academy decided yesterday to change the wording of the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts (DPD) in the norm that defines the writing of the adverb only without diacritical accent. According to RAE sources, the doctrine is not going to change in its essence and the word “only” will continue without an accent, whether it is an adverb or an adjective. But the rule will expressly admit that the speaker writes “only” in case he perceives ambiguity, if he considers that the tilde will avoid a confusion of meaning. A similar caveat will be recognized in the case of the demonstrative pronouns este, esta, ese, esa, aquel, aquella and their plurals.
Twelve years ago, in December 2010, the classification of the accent as “only” as a misspelling was a small linguistic drama, a first chapter of the culture wars that awaited us then. The Academy’s argument for making its decision (at that time included in the SAR Orthography) was to seek the maximum simplification of the standard. The Academy was justified in the certainty that the cases of ambiguity were very rare and easy to decipher naturally. Together with the solo accents and the demonstrative pronouns, the hiatus accents such as hyphen or truhan then fell.
The measure was discussed since its adoption: for many speakers, the solo accent was a refinement of the language, a trait of wealth that was easy to understand and that no minimally educated speaker would want to give up. For the other half of the Hispanic world, the accent was an anachronism and a form of elitism, a trap for speakers in a socio-normative position to detect those who have not enjoyed their education. At that time, the ideological interpretations of the Dictionary still sounded like something unusual.
The RAE was no stranger to the discussion. In 2013, the academic Salvador Gutiérrez acknowledged that compliance with the spelling rule (which he referred to at the time as “advice”) was uneven, and that the accents for solo and este continued to be used, also in the press and in books. of text. Salvador said then that “in orthography we must not adapt forceful positions, but rather try to reorient the uses.”
Other academics have expressed themselves in the same direction, acknowledging in public or in private that the 2010 regulation caused more confusion than it clarified. The new wording of the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts now recognizes this resistance.
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