“English is for business, French for love and Spanish for God.” Charles V, a Spanish king, used to say this about languages. He considered Spanish a rich language, with lots of words to express our feelings and thoughts. I am focusing on Spanish because it seems that we Mexicans, do not feel proud of our language. I point out this because Spanish is being reduced in different fields every day in the Mexican Republic by us Mexicans.

Here are some examples:

a)New generations are using “chido” constantly to describe a series of actions and nouns that they like. It looks this word is the only adjective in our vocabulary.
b)Another word is “way” to address each other. The funniest thing is that the people that use this noun do not know its spelling.
c)Our professional soccer players cannot make a single sentence accurately and utter “este” more than any other ”word”.
d)In the media, it is so sad and worrying to see how reporters, journalists, speakers, writers and advertising companies use Spanish incorrectly. We can hear on the radio “hubieron”, “ambos dos”,“fuistes” and dirty language to raise the rating of a program. In the newspapers we see lots of abbreviations, words without accents and words in all capital letters with no accents. There are billboards with wrong misspellings “tanbién” for example. On the news, there are a great many grammar mistakes such as “mañana comienza el congreso”, “termina el programa” and ”evacuaron a la gente”. The incorrect use of ordinal numbers such as “el veinteavo aniversario” and the incorrect stress pattern of “se adecua” and “se negocia”, stressed not on the second syllable, but on the third are other examples. Invitations are sometimes badly written “los invitamos a la película la cuál se…” and there are many errors in Spanish subtitles in movies “sé fue”, “sé enojo”, “mas lejos”, etc.
e)At schools, on bulletin boards the word “ingles” is written without an accent and with an initial capital letter in the middle or at the end of a sentence. Titles now are coupled with first names “la profesora Lety”, “Miss. Marta”. The use of incorrect punctuation –currently it is “in” to write a period at the end of each word or phrase when it is not required. It is so surprising to see that many students, at any level, omit the accent mark when spelling their first or last names.
f)Our Mexican president stresses words incorrectly. He thinks that all Spanish words are “esdrújulas”. Pay attention the next time you hear him speak.

In short, I would like to share an extract from a book called 1984 by George Orwell.
“Neolengua era la lengua oficial de Oceanía y fue creada para solucionar las necesidades ideológicas de Insog o Socialismo Inglés…”, “..el vocabulario de la neolengua era mínimo, y continuamente inventaban nuevos modos de reducirlo.” “…su vocabulario se empequeñecía en vez de agrandarse. Cada reducción era una ganancia, ya que cuanto menor era el área para escoger, más pequeña era la tentación de pensar. En definitiva, se espera construir un lenguaje articulado que surgiera de la laringe sin involucrar en absoluto a los centros del cerebro.”

By the way, 1984 is the origin of the concept of “Big Brother”. This book was written in 1949.