![\"Ch\u00e1vez](\"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/2013-03-06-Where-Would-the-Spanish-Language-Be-Without-Venezuela.jpg\")
<\/a>Ch\u00e1vez and Bol\u00edvar<\/p><\/div>\n
In 1999, Venezuelan president Hugo Ch\u00e1vez officially renamed\u00a0his country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The move underlined the fact that Venezuela had just joined the club of Latin American nations that embraced bolivarianismo<\/i>, or socialism inspired by the life and works of the nineteenth-century revolutionary Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar. Bol\u00edvar, who came to be known as El Libertator,<\/i> was a larger than life character who liberated half a dozen countries from Spanish rule.<\/p>\n
Today, there are entire books devoted to the rally calls Bol\u00edvar coined while liberating Colombia, Peru, Venezuela,\u00a0Ecuador, Panama, and the country that took his name: Bolivia. Perhaps thanks to his way with words, Bol\u00edvar became the best known of the Latin American revolutionaries who transformed Spain\u2019s four viceroyalties into seventeen independent countries by the beginning of the twentieth century, each with their own cultural production.<\/p>\n
But Bol\u00edvar wasn\u2019t Venezuela\u2019s only contribution to the future of Spanish.<\/p>\n
Before Bol\u00edvar, there was Francisco de Miranda, El Precursor<\/i>, the revolutionary figure who set the Latin American independence movement in motion. By 1790, Miranda conspired with the British to help Venezuela gain independence from Spain. In 1806, he led an attack on colonial Venezuela, waving a Venezuelan flag he had designed himself.<\/p>\n
Latin American independence was of course a fantastic boon for the Spanish language, since each new Spanish-speaking country had a unique vision, set of policies, and culture that in turn would further disseminate Spanish. The new Latin American republics would go on to produce a Spanish-speaking continent whose population was more than ten times that of Spain\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Yet without the third giant of Latin America\u2019s revolutionary period \u2013 also a Venezuelan \u2013 who knows what would have happened to Spanish in the New World?<\/p>\n
This was El Escritor <\/i>(the writer), Andr\u00e9s Bello. Bello understood that independence could end up splitting Spanish into separate dialects the way the continent split into separate political entities. He devoted his long life to defining a clear standard of Spanish that would be used throughout Latin America.<\/p>\n
The result? Bello\u2019s major work on language was the Gram\u00e1tica de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos<\/i> (Grammar of the Castilian <\/i>Language for the Use of Americans). First published in 1847, it <\/i>would go on to be an immense success, appearing in six revised <\/i>editions during his lifetime and more than seventy editions in the <\/i>twentieth century.<\/p>\n
Andr\u00e9s Bello has often been described as the Spanish-speaking world\u2019s version of Noah Webster, and indeed, like Webster, he linked language, education, law and nationhood. Bello\u2019s Gram\u00e1tica<\/i> was conceived for americanos<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Today, of all international languages, Spanish is the only one that has clear national standards, as well as an international standard. This is a direct consequence of Andr\u00e9s Bello\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Jean-Beno\u00eet Nadeau & Julie Barlow In 1999, Venezuelan president Hugo Ch\u00e1vez officially renamed\u00a0his country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The move underlined the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,54],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8138"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8275,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8138\/revisions\/8275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadeaubarlow.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>More about the history Spanish language can be found in our new book,\u00a0The Story of Spanish<\/a>, to be released May 2013 (St. Martin\u2019s Press).<\/p>\n