The “legitimate dialect”: Palacios, Unamuno, Saavedra, and linguistic ethno-nationalism in Chile in the early 20th century

Abstract

This paper studies the reception of Nicolás Palacios' ideas on Chilean Spanish and their relationship with the “Chilean race” in the field of language studies in Chile in the early 20th century. The study is based on a historiographical analysis of linguistic ideas from a glotopolitical perspective (i.e., in terms of linguistic ideologies), and takes as its object a corpus of metalinguistic discourses published between 1905 and 1908 as books, pamphlets, or articles in the press by the Basque writer and philologist Miguel de Unamuno and the Chilean language teacher Julio Saavedra Molina. The analysis focuses on identifying the positions underlying the ideas and representations of language expressed by the authors of these discourses, and establishing their relationship with the material context of production and with the history of the formation of linguistic ideologies in Chile, considered in their supranational context. The conclusions of the study highlight that, despite the eccentricity of Palacios' thesis, it is not an intellectual product isolated from its context and completely divergent from the prevailing climate of opinion in Chile at the time, as revealed by Saavedra's ideas. It therefore represents a significant departure from the dominant ideology of the long 19th century in Chile and an unavoidable counterpoint to Hispanism, represented here by Unamuno.