Revisión crítica y análisis glotopolítico del índice de importancia internacional de las lenguas y otros «alegres guarismos» de la demolingüística hispánica.

Identifier:  TDX:2826

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX2826

Authors:  Pié Jahn, Guillermo

Abstract:
This Ph.D. thesis is framed within the critical sociolinguistics and the study of language ideologies. It has both quantitative and qualitative components. The quantitative part includes a chronological review of the Cervantes Institute's demolinguistic counts and of different numerical indexing works ‒international importance of languages index‒ since the early 1990s. The qualitative part explains the ideological implications of these quantitative works which appear as valid, reliable, neutral, rigorous and scientific, and officially presented by an institution as influential as the Cervantes Institute, have a wide dissemination and very strong social impact. The research concludes that the quantitative data provided by the Cervantes Institute to assert that Spanish is (i) “the second most widely spoken mother tongue in the world”, (ii) “the second most spoken language by total number of speakers”, and (iii) “the second most important language in the international arena” is incorrect and ideologically biased.