"De “gramática para americanos” a “gramática de todos”. El caso de Bello (1847)"["From ‘Gramática para americanos’ to ‘Gramática de todos’. The Case of Bello (1847)"]

This paper discusses Andrés Bello’s Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos (1847). In doing so, it reviews its critical position on the academic grammars that circulated between 1796 and 1854 and the changes introduced by Salvá in 1830. Then, it analyzes Bello’s Gramática in the light of some of its tenets: the attempt to unify language from the different varieties of Spanish; the choice of educated over popular language; the canon-based choice of literary texts; the preference of written language as superior to speech; the rejection of loans and structural neologisms; and the delatinization of grammar. The conclusion drawn from the analysis is that, despite Bello’s like of Peninsular Spanish, his Gramática is, on the basis of its innovative doctrine, a theoretical construct that gives an account of the general linguistic system of Spanish, irrespective of the specific morphological and syntatic features of historical, regional or social varieties.