Gramática y debate político en el Chile de la primera mitad del siglo XIX

Abstract

Both in the transmission of linguistic ideas and in the emergence of writing norms of a language, political debate has always played an essential role—either due to its repercussions, or due to its limited prominence. When Chile began its process of independence from the second decade of the 19th century onwards, the country made it a political priority to eliminate any colonial aftereffects on the new economic and social structure that was being erected, and the language did not escape these filters. The coming of the printing press—relatively late in this part of the world—as well as the appearance of different newspapers, motivated an awakening of public opinion, which also reflected new attitudes towards the education of a people who wanted to turn themselves into an independent nation. Using these premises, this work aims to recover the political debate around grammar and its teaching in Chile in the first half of the 19th century and examine the attitudes towards the language—explicit and implicit—that may have come to the cultured speakers (and writers) of the time, or to those that were in a process of learning.