Arturo Pérez-Reverte says ‘an illiterate pundit, YouTuber or influencer’ has more impact than a literary prize winner
One of Spain’s best-known novelists has launched a withering attack on the country’s leading linguistic authority, saying it ignores the opinions of writers when it comes to changes in language, and that its “anything goes Taliban” yields instead to social media, commentators and influencers.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte used a column in Monday’s El Mundo to accuse the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE) – of which he is a member – of failing to live up to the mission laid out in its celebrated motto of “cleaning, fixing and giving shine” to the Spanish language.
These days “an illiterate pundit, YouTuber or influencer can have more linguistic influence than a Cervantes prize winner”, he said.
The author of the Captain Alatriste series lamented that the voices of professional writers who are members of the academy “scarcely count in the RAE today”. He wrote: “Many of them, whether alive or recently deceased, have pointed out mistakes, impoverishments and trivialisations of the language, only to find that the now-dominant sector of the academy – the ‘anything goes’ Taliban – ignores them or treats them as respectable, but irrelevant, opinions.
