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versão On-line ISSN 1990-8644

Conrado vol.16 no.72 Cienfuegos ene.-fev. 2020  Epub 02-Fev-2020

 

Artículo original

Challenges of the media to the Spanish language

Retos de los medios de comunicación para el idioma español

0000-0002-1175-0128Carlos Lázaro Nodals García1  *  , 0000-0001-8773-0003Eugenia del Carmen Mora Quintana1  , 0000-0001-9210-3004Regla Dolores Quesada Cabrera1  , 0000-0002-7468-5271Lietter Suárez Vivas1 

1 Universidad de Cienfuegos “Carlos Rafael Rodríguez”. Cuba

ABSTRACT

The article approaches the current situation of the Spanish language in Cuba around the influence of the usage of the speech in the massive media, mainly the audiovisuals and internet. It is analyzed from the perspective of the Linguistics, how they affect the mediatics transgressions to the renovation and conservation of the same one. An exhibition of the affectations is made that takes of the mediatic field in our sociocultural environment and those that it plows product of the systematic war of fifth generation or cultural war that there is among its strategic objectives the one sustained and calculated destruction of the maternal language and in the authentic way of Spanish's speech that is used in Cuba.

Key words: Spanish language; media; cultural war; hybridization

RESUMEN

El artículo aborda la situación actual de la lengua española en Cuba en torno a la influencia del empleo del discurso en los medios de comunicación masiva, principalmente los audiovisuales e internet. Se analiza desde la perspectiva de la Lingüística cómo afectan las transgresiones mediáticas a la renovación y conservación de la misma. Se hace una exposición de las afectaciones que en nuestro entorno sociocultural provienen del campo mediático y las que son producto de la guerra sistemática de quinta generación o guerra cultural, que tiene entre sus objetivos estratégicos la sostenida y calculada destrucción de la lengua materna y de la auténtica forma del habla del español que se usa en Cuba.

Palabras-clave: Idioma español; medios de comunicación; guerra cultural; hibridación

Introduction

The language is a dialectical system. In their practical realization it is captured in a relationship among elements that are incorporated and other elements that operate for their conservation. So that their development continues and prevail, they have to be in constant overlapping (but with tendency to the balance) its renovation factors and conservation. The prevalence of the conservation cannot be given for on the evolution neither vice versa. Nevertheless, as sociocultural phenomenon, there are moments of conservatism and of evolution. In the Spanish language, and in Spanish that one speaks in Cuba, specifically, it is captured in the moment historical present, an evolution situation, which generates theoretical disquisitions, academic, educational and journalistic concerns, and the common citizen's comments.

These contradictions are given in the next triad: media-social norms-Spanish that one speaks in Cuba. Of the linguistic correction, it is said that the correct thing is what the group accepts as good, that is to say, the correction levels depend on the community that it receives what is transmitting. It is necessary to see it in function of for who it is spoken and in what moment. The school should form talkative competences in the sense that a linguistic norm is used according to the social context in that one speaks.

Spanish's problems, in the entire world Spanish-speaker, they are related with their teaching: it is imparted grammar and other matters that establish the programs, but not to speak with correction neither they are formed competitions to go to the speakers or the group in general (Hills & Osorio, 2013)

A singular challenge to the stability of the Spanish language comes in times of the computerized society, of the prevalence of the massive media that model the public opinion, the social imaginary, and they define the sense of the life in people. One of their impacts is the destruction of the autochthonous languages penetrating them with anglicisms. To tunnel the good use of the language, to foment the vulgarization of the oral, written language and gestual, it is also part of a strategy of imposition of values to achieve the cultural hegemony, politics and economic. “The obedience is looked for based on the admiration that feels the one dominated by the culture, the economy, the power and until the conqueror's language”. (Ramonet, 2015)

Development

The popular speech and the social norms are alive source of elements of the spoken chain that they emanate of the same root of the cultural identity of a town. The dynamics of the social groups determines its sociocultural behavior. In that process influence it linguistic and not linguistic factors. In the popular speech happens different phenomenons, for each one of those which are different valuations, in dependence of the contexts in that are manifested and with varied characteristics. In Cuba it is perceived as something normal to pronounce podque, it is a colloquial feature; in very certain contexts it is that one says porque (because).

With those norms of own correction, the Cubans communicate in their interpersonal relationships, but also in the family, the neighborhood, the school and the work; that they are the places of the most intense socialization. This social communication is manifested in the whole group of the society. Consent doesn't exist about if this affects, it facilitates or it hinders the correct development of the speech. The family is the primary nucleus of transmission from the world to the children; the home has a basic paper in the acquisition and use of the maternal language. Then the school has the task of taking the learning of that language acquired by natural transmission in the family breast ahead. To the classroom the boy coming from a family that certain model transmitted him that is the one that recognizes the social group to that she belongs, the neighborhood arrives he resides. The formation of the linguistic pattern has its first step in the family.

At the first teaching levels the children arrive with the pronunciation, intonation and rhythm that are brought of the community, the neighborhood and the home. These are not always the appropriate ones for the insert in the institutional socialization.

Then in the school the teaching of the literary language begins. That teaching is necessary for the insert in the culture to which we belong. In this level the maternal language is acquired from the academy and politically instituted; but it is necessary to see it in their fair place and in their relationship with the other forms, because, in the measure in that moves away from the vernacular language, it can be frustration source, of school failure, so that a careful handling is required (Lozano, Peña-Marín & Abril, 1982).

The media makes that this process is transversal, mainly those that fit in the category of audiovisual. What is seen in the means is assumed automatically as valid and noted, and it is inserted in the daily use.

This same way we expose ourselves to artificial ways of pronouncing, to invented words, sentences and constructions of the high culture that sometimes touch the pompous thing, among others. The means, as culture transmitters, are in that way settling down (intentionally or not) linguistic models that leave above the social reality and until of the learned language. They use strange norms; they force the phonological system of the language with pronunciations unaware to Spanish that one speaks in Cuba, typical of Spain and Argentina, for example. In search of a supposed elegance and a corporate distinction they are promoting absurd, establishing models that constitute nonsenses.

They are sociocultural phenomenons of the postmodern, computerized and global society. The impact of the massive means of communication in the daily life, its current value as models and its capacity to establish and to give hierarchy linguistic uses, mentalities and behaviors associated to them, is an objective process. The strongest incidence in this sense has it the audiovisual ones: they are the main form in that people appropriate of the inherited culture and they transform it, the way of working in their daily life, of building plans of life and existential senses, of being recognized individually and in the group. They establish a culture that privileges the frivolity, it reinforces the ephemeral thing and it transforms key elements of the socialization like the language.

Paradoxically, the means are also an instrument that contributes to the study of the language and of visibility of the systems of actions for their invigoration. Among all, the television can inform on the respect to the maternal language, to educate, to correct and to guide on Spanish's variant that one speaks in Cuba, to promote the study of our language and to put in knowledge of the whole society the national strategies whose purpose is to strengthen Spanish. The programming television sample the national strategies for the development of the habit of the reading and it can favor a correct use of Spanish's variant that we speak in Cuba.

It can favor and to define correction approaches. For this it is required the training of speakers, hosters, actors and actresses; and other personal that speak in camera transmitting their respective messages according to their actings. This way, the means can be factor of strength of the language, when carrying out a contribution to the unit inside Spanish's diversity. It is necessary to grant priority to the topic of the language like a strategic problem for the evolution and maintenance of the culture of the country. It is not elitism question neither eruditness, it concerns all member of the social model.

The idiomatic poverty wraps us every day and it is noticed in any place. It generally agrees with uses and abuses that arrive from the screen of the television. Social communicators and interviewees use a bizarre language, even with invented words. Their parliaments begin with turns of this cut: es un lujo decirles que (It is a luxury to tell you that), buenisísimos días, (very very very good morning) and others. Where was it the antecedent that expresses the real intention of the infinitive decir (to say), in the first sentence? The organic unit should not be ignored that operates between thought and language. That expressive poverty is a sign of poverty of ideas.

Another challenge coming from the means is the one that one gives in the environment of the cyberspace. The access to internet through telephones, tablets, laptops and other devices have enthroned the denominated electronic language; it notarizes digital or textual economy. The person that navigates through the net is exposed daily to a textual disorder in which the bad spelling is the smaller than the wrongs. “The typologycal chaos, the normative rupture, the invention of words, the mixture with words of other languages is some of the phenomenons that are appreciated in the written language that millions of peoples publish to the nets”. (Nodals, Quesada Cabrera & Mora Quintana, 2016)

If we analyze Internet, like dominant massive mean of communication at the present time, we notice an overwhelming quantity of texts qualified in the digital typology that they have been published of the original in Spanish and they suffer in that translation-edition, a rupture of their original sense and of the coherence and cohesion. They are carriers of bad spelling; they contribute to the heterographic chaos and a phenomenon has given in calling himself babelification of Spanish. It doesn't only happen against our language, but it is that in the case of our maternal language, it is one of the biggest linguistic and literary communities in the world.

The professional has to know the language that is not to dominate technical terms of the specialty in which acts well. This is necessary for the good acting and reasoning in the realization of the career. But without the exact domain of the maternal language, how will a graduate of the university interpret the phenomenons and to be explained to them to itself? Every day the tendency is imposed to only read in the screen of the computer to that the information of the objective world arrives for that way, the jargons and abbreviations are universalized that are used by mail in the exchange of messages electronic and the cellular telephone. Of there the errors that flood the communication in the scientific community come and at once of informing the science.

Apart from that the bad habits and the ignorance in the maternal language use can move noxiously to the learning and the usage of other languages, it is worth to stop in some essential elements. At any level of the nation not critical the learning of other languages should be stimulated, as well as Spanish's teaching for foreigners for non qualified people. There is already in Cuba private centers of teaching where English is given to children and girls of the country as if they resided in Miami or in New York. Places also exist where the Spanish language is taught to foreigners that they want to speak our language, situation that puts to the Cuban institutions in the urgency of regulating that activity.

If the academic programs of these schools are revised, it is noticed that the system of knowledge emanate of the methods that teem in internet and in computer applications of Windows and Android. Those methods of learning of Spanish lack scientific rigor and they suffer of a didactic seriousness. They are, in the most of the cases, components of a pedagogic marketing that promises their students the domain of a language in thirty days, forty five days, and other temporary terms that don't have methodological justification. Of their empiric application they are inserted in the speech daily pronunciation errors, it notarizes and idiomatic bad habits that attempt against the conservation of our language.

The graduate university students from who a general-integral domain of the language is expected, exhibit perturbings levels of flaws in its use and application in its labor specialty. These deficiencies coincide with the errors that come from the massive media. The maternal language has importance in the social projection for all the members of a community, especially for the graduates of the superior level, for the condition of indispensable professional ability that you had the domain of the language in them. The instruments with which it is counted put in evidence, however, beyond figures and percents, real lacks in the formation of the futureprofessionals as for the spelling and the writing.

There are deficiencies in the distinction between the oral code and the writing, the capacity to achieve an appropriate coherence on the base of the handling of the cohesive resources; the creativity and readiness of ideas for the construction of texts; in summary: that our young applicants to university careers still confront difficulties in the handling of their expressive instrument, not alone orthographic, but of quality of the ideas, of coherence and cohesion that would demand a bigger and more creative practice, a more systematic and more consequent evaluation, and in particular, to place the responsibility of the knowledge essentially by the own student, in the measure that it learning becomes in significant for him. The results, included those obtained in basic Spanish that is evaluated in the courses by encounter endorse the above-mentioned.

In the students of the day regular course who come from the preuniversity institutes, the preference has been detected by other norms, the features of insecurity and the phenomenons of hybridization of the native language, phenomenons that could be influencing in the inattention of the own language. The study, the science in general, a specific science, the practice, they necessarily go by a language: it is thought of this language, it is observed in the language, and one works in the language, science is made in the language. Therefore, if the Cuban university wants to form scientific competent cannot neglect this aspect.

The experiences in the superior education, they have hurtled as a result that to diminish the rigor and intellectual demand is not synonymous of development. Even in the desire of increasing the promotion by means of the paternalism and exams less challengers has been gotten the contrary effect certainly. It is wanted to point that we sustain the same approach of the Cuban Academy of the Language when it expressed: the domain of the language is not achieved neither has it demonstrated with an entrance exam.

The methodological strategies in order to the creation of talkative competences, of understanding reader and of textual construction, they have to be supported in the superior education by activities that improve the knowledge of the language beyond the academic thing, and to stimulate the necessity from their knowledge to a level that surpasses that of the common citizen with an integral general culture. The rhetorical pattern of the students of the university still comes basically from the audiovisual one. This is product of institutional, cultural-historical factors (cultural hybridization and globalization of the cultural industry) and of the internet domain that has caused that the university is not today the incostestable place of legitimation of the knowledge.

And there is another aspect, veiled and therefore difficult to detect; that it is in the fact that the media with internet to the head, they are the tips of lance of the war of fifth generation, or cultural war. The thinking tanks have elaborated programmatic platforms for their unfolding in different regions of the world. In the case of Latin America, one of the pillars of this invasion is in the patient, imperceptible and systematic modification work, vulgarization and disappearance of languages, dialects and languages of micro communities and unique human groups in the planet.

The hawks of the cultural war have as premise to make people to know and English speak, think the world of English and live the life in English. That postulate that can seem gibberish of the gibberishes, is an operational principle of the dirty war of the Central Agency of Intelligence (CIA) to impose the American way of life and the adoption of the patterns of life, culture and consumption Americans. Carl Rove, the former president's George W. Bush consultant insisted in the strategic of the imposition from English to all the nations of the world like guarantee of the all-embracing power of United States of America.

The cultural products of these monopolies have a level of impeccable technical and artistic realization, although their quality like cultural, educational and humanistic product leaves a lot that to want. Their function is to establish a unique, banal, vile aesthetic pleasure, hedonist and ludic. They are the tip of lance of a sophisticated and systematic penetration work and cultural dominance. The Brazilian anthropologist Rebeiro (1998), alerted that, of the hand of a revolutionary technology, “there is a true colonization in course. North America is fulfilling its paper enormous effectiveness in the sense of looking for complements that will make us dependent permanently of them”.

The Congress of the United States declared the existence of the operation Effective Connection that promotes the American interests in Latin America through the social nets:

With more than 50% of the population of the world smaller than 30 years of age, the new social means and the associate technologies that are so popular inside this demographic group, they will continue revolutionizing the communications in the future. The social means and the technological incentives in Latin America on the base of the political, economic and social realities will be crucial for the success of the government efforts of United States of America in the region (Committee on Foreign Relations, 2011).

The centers of power look for are to create opinion states, social representations, to implant consumption patterns and ideals of life to the style American way of life. Their main target is the youths, mainly the university students, the future political leaders' quarry, of opinion and it influences. Their task bases it is to make the minds of its targets, with all the productions of the cultural industry. The long term objective is to enthrone icons, implant aesthetic, to establish musical likes, believe existential senses and conceptions of the world, so that it is accepted then in an inadvertent way the political narrative that they need to create right citizens. The first confrontation trench to this penetration should establish it from the pedagogic work.

In the last years, we have seen the abandonment of the mensuration of the dictation ability, fundamental for the professionals; to the lack of effective strategies in connection with the domain of the Spanish language, inversely to the upgrading of the foreign languages, in particular English; and to the consistency lack among the theoretical postures before the language and the practical actions in that they are manifested. Many areas of the teaching of the language and the literature even go in excess to the audiovisual one.

Even in people that have high degree of professional responsibility in that sphere, wanting to achieve an elegance gleaned in saying, they invent expressions that don't make more than to demonstrate the urgency of perfecting the teaching and the knowledge of the language. These idiomatic violations are plentiful everywhere in Cuba, and in alarming degree. For not going farther, coarse to mention the frequency with which errors of elementary concordance are suffered in the grammar's plane, or the radical alteration of the sense in expressions as common as: favoritism (favoritism) instead of ventaja (advantage) or prebenda (prebend); and to give to the fret with (dar al traste con), that systematically is used instead of propiciar (to propitiate), permitir (to allow), facilitar (to facilitate).

An example of something still more serious, and it goes being already an epidemic, it is the employment of humanitario as synonym of humano, when that adjective qualifies to what is beneficial for the humanity, for people. In the written press, the television and internet, even in high political podiums it is spoken of crisis and humanitarian disasters. Such an error is good to endorse the qualification of humanitarian given by the American imperialism and its allies to interventions that those forces genocidists carry out to slaughter towns and to steal them their natural wealth. Doesn't come of there the manipulation of that epithet? To accept it by mistake or ignorance doesn't subtract graveness to the matter and until it reinforces it.

That is to say that the objective course of the Spanish, rich, diverse language, spoken by human groups of a vast spiritual wealth and a psychology prone to the creativity and the originality, it is forced by this deliberate attack. The renovation and conservation leaves their natural sociolinguisticprocess due to the irruption of linguistic and structural factors that are other people's factors, most of them coming from the digital media. There the biggest risk that has our today maternal language is.

Conclusions

In the Cuban sociocultural context, the messages and speeches coming from the massive media are a source of contamination of the Spanish language. Their confrontation requires a planning that involves methods and technical of the Pedagogy and the Communication.

The planned introduction of linguistic elements of English, the contamination and destruction of dialects and autochthonous languages, included the Spanish language; are part of the strategies of the imperialistic cultural war.

It becomes necessary in the superior education to implement strategies of upgrading of the correct use of the maternal language, beyond their integral general domain.

Bibliographic references

Committee on Foreign Relations. (2011). Latin American Governments Need to “Friend” Social Half and Technology. Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate. One Hundred Twelfth Congress. . https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CPRT-112SPRT70501/html/CPRT-112SPRT70501.htmLinks ]

Hills, C., & Andrés, O. (2013). The talkative focus in the teaching of the language. Paidos. [ Links ]

Lozano, J., Peña-Marín, C., & Abril, G. (1982). Análisis del discurso. Hacia un a semiótica de la interacción textual. Cátedra. [ Links ]

Nodals García, C. L., Quesada Cabrera, R. D., & Mora Quintana, E. C. (2016). Algunas consideraciones sobre la economía textual. Revista Conrado, 12 (52), 41-47. https://conrado.ucf.edu.cu/index.php/conrado/article/view/279/278Links ]

Ramonet, I. (2015). Un delicioso despotismo. Ciencias Sociales. [ Links ]

Rebeiro, D. (1998). Amerindia en el tercer milenio. Oralidad. Lenguages. http://www.lacult.unesco.org/docc/oralidad_09_6-14-amerindia-hacia-el-tercer.pdfLinks ]

Received: November 05, 2019; Accepted: January 25, 2020

*Autor para correspondencia. E-mail: clnodals@ucf.edu.cu

Los autores declaran no tener conflictos de intereses.

Los autores han participado en la redacción del trabajo y análisis de los documentos.

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