Getting your player ready...
MADRID — Can a Barcelona truck driver be expected to speak like a Buenos Aires banker? Can rules be imposed on a language spoken by 400 million people stretching from Madrid to Manila? The academic overseers of the language of Cervantes have taken a stab at it, unveiling their first Spanish grammar guidelines in nearly 80 years.
The fruit of their toil is a nearly 4,000-page tome in two volumes presented Thursday, with yet another to come out next year.
The book is billed as a sort of linguistic map that painstakingly documents today’s Spanish in all its richness — there are nearly 20 ways to say ballpoint pen, for instance — and how it varies from country to country, or within one, or from one social class to another.
