Cyberspace has welcomed a new, Wikipedia-style tool designed to help the world’s nearly 400-million Spanish-speakers consult on proper use of their language.
The website, called Wikilengua, has been running on a test basis since August. But it got an official unveiling last Thursday at Casa de America, a cultural centre in Madrid that aims to symbolise and enhance Spain’s strong ties with Latin America and their shared language — the world’s third-most-spoken, after Chinese and English.
Spanish is spoken in more than 20 countries and poses academics with the daunting and fluid challenge of keeping track of wide variations in grammar and vocabulary, in which there can be many ways to say such simple words as ”car” or ”pen”.
The site is an interactive one, similar to online encyclopedia Wikipedia where internet users can consult the page and modify entries. But whereas some forums can lend themselves to erroneous additions or exchanges of opinionated messages, Wikilengua’s founders say it is different because contributors have to be registered and it features a team of supervisors that checks contributions and filters ones deemed wrong or inappropriate.
”The first cyberspace forum that is open and dedicated to bringing together honestly all knowledge about the Spanish language was born today,” said Alex Grijelmo, president of the Spanish national news agency Efe, part of the foundation that created the website.
”Wikilengua aims to serve as a place for reflection on language, the grand instrument of human intelligence,” Grijelmo said at the presentation.
The site is now receiving about 1 000 visits a day. That may sound small, but it has only just been made officially public and the number is rising steadily, said Javier Bezos, coordinator of the website.
It is the brainchild of Fundeu BBVA, a foundation created by Efe and BBVA, Spain’s number-two bank, as a way to monitor and offer advice on correct use of Spanish, especially in the news media.
The idea behind Wikilengua is to go global and online, also enlisting the expertise of the Spanish Royal Academy, the official watchdog of the language, and 20-odd affiliated academies in Latin America, the United States and as far away as the Philippines.
”What we are doing with Wikilengua is open an immense network of highways granting access to the academy and the work of the academies,” Garcia de la Concha said. ”Now we open a space for exchanging opinions, studies and suggestions, on problems with the language.” — Sapa-AP