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This paper analyzes the controversy over the creation of the Canarian Academy of Language. I adopt a glottopolitical perspective that considers institutional linguistic descriptions as interventions in the public space of language in order to maintain power and organize specific social orders. I examine the antecedents of the study of Atlantic Spanish and Spanish in the Canary Islands from the fifties to the nineties at the Universidad de La Laguna, and I observe a break in the language discourses that construct Canarian Spanish as a symbol of identity, a result of the dynamics of quasi–nationalism in the state of the autonomies. The need for the Canarian Academy of Language functioned as part of the rhetoric of the abandonment of the state and was established in terms of repairing a sociolinguistic trauma that would be solved with the action of philologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We base this paper on the linguistic study of seven letters selected from the Archivo General de Indias. Their interest resides in the signature of their writers, in this case women, who answer their relatives about their move to the New World. The analysis of the linguistic, graphemic, phonetic, grammatical and lexical phenomena, shows variants of less formal records and in many cases attributable to the poor cultural level of their scribes, as well as to the possible connotations of style that the feminine condition explains. The textual typology follows the intimist structure of these missives between relatives, but it reveals contrastive expressions and uses from a sociolinguistic perspective, with preferences in the idiomatic resources of the women immersed in American colonial emigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]