Language, politics and secularization : Language-ideological debates in the Latin American Press in the 1870s

The following paper provides an analysis of the central role played by authority in language- ideological debates in Spanish-speaking South America during the 1870s. The interventions under scrutiny here share some fundamental features: first, the invocation of the authority of modern philology and the representations associated to it; second, the presence of Spanish attempts to regain influence over its former colonies through language and cultural overseas policies; third, the inextricable embedment of those language-ideological debates in the political debates of the time, including the confrontation between the Catholic Church and liberalism. This paper provides an insight into the field of language ideologies in the 1870s, by describing the ways in which authority is constructed and disputed, at a time and place where the very space for public debate (in the Habermasian sense of Öffentlichkeit) is being discussed and constructed.Fil: Ennis, Juan Antonio. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (UNLP-CONICET); Argentina