Abstract The present article builds upon two articles by Guillermo Guitarte (1981 and 1983) in which the Argentine linguist linked Rufino José Cuervo’s fifth and subsequent prologues of the Apuntaciones críticas al lenguaje bogotano with his responses to Juan Valera regarding the fragmentation of the Spanish language in America (1899–1901) and an unfinished project titled Castellano popular y literario (1944). Guitarte traced Cuervo’s prologues and concluded that his supposed “change of opinion” regarding linguistic fragmentation in the New World was, rather, a progressive evolution of his thinking – from an opposition between barbarism and correct form to that of popular language and literary language. This article argues that this valorization of linguistic orders enables a reassessment of Cuervo’s work by foregrounding the overlap of this conceptual pair and by attending to the literary matrix underlying his notion of language. In doing so, it shows how this framework shaped Cuervo’s participation in the institutionalization of letters and the formation of an intellectual elite in Colombia, while also revealing a categorization of language that brings him closer to Valera’s conceptualization than is usually acknowledged.
Lorena Albert Ferrando (Mon,) studied this question.
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