The traits of Burgos speech began to extend beyond its immediate area due to the military success of the Kingdom of Castile.
Crucially, speakers of the Burgos dialect were involved in the 1085 capture of Toledo, which was the traditional old capital of a united peninsular kingdom in the Visigothic era.
[4] This city became the main center of the kingdom and the Christian Primate see, giving its local dialect a privileged position.
These included extensive works on history, astronomy, law, and other fields of knowledge, either composed originally or translated from Islamic sources.
[5] This huge amount of writing based out of Toledo, in fields previously reserved for Latin,[6] had a standardizing effect on written Romance in the area.
Each of the three more well-established written languages, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, was associated with a particular religious community, while Castilian or a closely related dialect was spoken by nearly everyone.
The gap between the largely unchanged system developed under Alfonso X and spoken Spanish expanded due to changes such as the evolution of sibilants and the loss of /h/, which occurred during this time, and betacism, or the merger of the phonemes /b/ and /v/, which had become complete in northern Spain by the fifteenth century.
Much of northern Spain, as well as Andalusia and Latin America, uniformly uses an etymological, case-based system in which lo, la, los, las retain their accusative value, while le, les is only used for indirect objects.
[14] A number of phonetic features which have since become restricted to nonstandard speech were frequently represented in writing during the Spanish Golden Age.
For example, the handling of syllable-final labial and velar consonants in a number of Latinate words, such as concepto 'concept' and absolver 'absolve' was highly variable during this period.
[21] Between then and 1815, the Academy carried out a significant number of spelling reforms, until Spanish orthography essentially reached its modern form.
[25] Following a period of concern over the unity of the language, Latin American Spanish began to be taken into account in designing prescriptive grammars and dictionaries, from the mid-20th century onwards.
[35] During the 1880s, a new political situation and the intellectual independence of the former colonies drove the Real Academia Española to propose the formation of branch academies in the Spanish-speaking republics.
With that, he was trying to counteract the prediction made by Venezuelan poet Andrés Bello in the prologue (p. xi) to his Grammar of 1847, which warned of the profusion of regional varieties that would "flood and cloud much of what is written in America, and, altering the structure of the language, tend to make it into a multitude of irregular, licencious, barbarian dialects".
On the other hand, the Colombian philologist Rufino José Cuervo—who shared Bello's prognosis of the eventual fragmentation of Spanish into a plurality of mutually unintelligible languages (although unlike Bello he celebrated it)—warned against the use of the written medium to measure the unity of the language, considering it a "veil that covers local speech".
This issue was documented poignantly in the 1935 treatise by Amado Alonso entitled El problema de la lengua en América (The problem of language in [Spanish] America),[39] and was reiterated in 1941 when the scholar Américo Castro published La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense y su sentido histórico (The linguistic peculiarity of River Plate Spanish and its historical significance).
Castro declared that the peculiarities of Argentine Spanish, especially the voseo, were symptoms of "universal plebeianism", "base instincts", "inner discontent, [and] resentment upon thinking about submitting to any moderately arduous rule".
[41] According to Castro's diagnosis, the strong identity of the Buenos Aires dialect was due to the general acceptance of popular forms at the expense of educated ones.
Much of Menéndez Pidal's work is aimed at pursuing that goal, recommending greater zeal in the persecution of "incorrect" usage through "the teaching of grammar, doctrinal studies, dictionaries, the dissemination of good models, [and] commentary on the classical authors, or, unconsciously, through the effective example that is propagated through social interaction and literary creation".
The lasting influence of linguistic centralism has led some commentators to claim that the problem of fragmentation is non-existent and that it is enough simply to emulate educated language.
One author, for example, repeated the doctrine of Menéndez Pidal when stating that: [i]t is possible that [speakers in] one or several of [the] mass media, at a particular moment, may give cause for concern because of their use of vernacular forms.
This goal soon proved to be an elusive one: even if the results could, on occasion, approximate a universally intelligible form, at the same time the process prevented the transmission of a familiar, intimate, or everyday tone.
Others, such as the journalist Fermín Bocos (director of Radio Exterior de España), denied the existence of a problem and expressed the idea of the supposed superiority of educated Castilian Spanish over dialects with more influence from other languages.
Finally, experts from the Americas such as Lila Petrella stated that a neutral Spanish language could possibly be developed for use in purely descriptive texts, but that the major variations among dialects with regard to semantics and pragmatics would imply that it is impossible to define a single standard variety that would have the same linguistic value for all Spanish-speakers.
Above all, certain grammatical structures are impossible to form in a neutral way, due to differences in the verb conjugations used (e.g. the use of the second-person familiar pronoun vos in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Central American countries, while most other countries prefer tú, and most Colombians tend to use usted in the informal context—and all three pronouns require different verb conjugations).