This paper aims to contextualize the articles gathered in this special issue, by means of a global characterization of the figure and work of the German linguist Rudolf Lenz, living in Chile from 1890 until his death. We describe his role as that of a glottopolitical vector, i.e. a key figure in the circulation and transformation of knowledge and ideological representations of the languages of Chile and their speakers. We highlight that his arrival to Chile caused a languageideological fracture, as he confronted the hegemony of linguistic normativism and hispanism, established on the basis of the influential works by Andrés Bello. His polemical stance towards the dominant ideology explains that the recovering and revaluation of his work is a relatively recent phenomenon, as some of the articles of this special issue show. On the other hand, we warn about the risk of raising hagiographic readings of Lenz without considering the complexity of his context and the role of his works in the scientific, cultural and linguistic policies of his time.
Keywords:
Rudolf Lenz, Glottopolitics, Linguistic historiography, Chilean Spanish, mapudungun
Author Biographies
Juan Antonio Ennis, Universidad Nacional de La Plata; CONICET
Para correspondencia, dirigirse a: Juan Antonio Ennis (juanennis@conicet.gov.ar), Centro de Estudios de Teoría y Crítica Literaria, Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (CONICET-Universidad Nacional de La Plata), calle 51 entre 124 y 125 (1925), Ensenada, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Darío Rojas, Universidad de Chile
Para correspondencia, dirigirse a: Darío Rojas (darioroj@uchile.cl), Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Departamento de Lingüística. Av. Capitán Ignacio Carrera Pinto 1025, piso 3, Ñuñoa, Santiago, Chile.
Ennis, J. A., & Rojas, D. (2020). Rudolf Lenz revisited: a glottopolitical vector in a modernizing country. Boletín De Filología, 55(2), pp. 11–32. Retrieved from https://analesderecho.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/60597
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