Two explorations of hate speech against the Andalusian variety, from the bookish tradition to the digital press

Abstract

The aim of this work is to trace a route on the perception of the variety of Spanish spoken in Andalusia, from its beginnings in the 16th century to its presence in current technological supports, such as those evidenced by the digital press. For this purpose, we will select a series of representative samples: book references from the 16th to 19th centuries, audiovisual extracts from television series,films and, finally, journalistic texts collected in the Spanish digital press. The corpus arises as a result of our experience as researchers of the literary representation of Andalusian and of the linguistic ideologies reflected in the media. The latter are inventoried in a resource available to the entire academic community, such as the Virtual Linguistic Archive of the “Lengua y Prensa” project (www.lenguayprensa.uma.es). The analysis of some crucial landmarks will serve to reinforce a fundamental conclusion: despite the disguise of innocence with which it is usually dressed (throughits association with grace, humour or sympathy as an object of anthropological study), on other occasions the hate speech to Andalusian reveals the crudest intention of the person who issues it: personal disqualification, contempt for a society or position of superiority.