“Homosexual marriage” will be at the next edition of the Dictionary

7/29/10. “The Academy does not legislate, it does not create realities. It just introduces meanings and terms in the Dictionary that already exist in language”

 

EFE.

The Real Academia Española has the incorporation of “homosexual marriage” to the Dictionary “very advanced”, a meaning that does not appear among the novelties that the RAE has uploaded today on the Net, but that “will appear without any doubt” in the Dictionary next edition, that will be published in 2013.

 

The secretary of the RAE, Darío Villanueva, expresses himself on those terms in the interview he agreed to give to EFE on the occasion of the wide list of novelties that can already be consulted at the Web version of the Dictionary, which update the content of  the 22^nd edition of this essential work of reference.

 

The approval in 2005 of the law in Spain that allows marriage between people of the same sex –this same month Argentina has summoned up- led the Academy to consider “the need to modify the meaning of the word “marriage” in order to reflect “the reality the law has brought about”.

 

However, as it usually happens with any new incorporation to the Dictionary, it is a complex process.

 

The academicians themselves “got the need” to include the meaning of “homosexual marriage” and, from then on, the Lexicography Institute began “the documentary study of the sources that prove that this meaning has its sense”, explains Villanueva.

 

“The Academy does not legislate, it does not create realities. It just introduces terms that already exist in language. It does not bring in any value jugdement, it acts absolutely objectively”, but always bearing in mind that any decision would “affect a 450 million people community”, stresses the secretary.

 

However, the 21 Academies of the Spanish Language left must reach a consensus about everything in the Dictionary, so the inclusion of “homosexual marriage” has to be “endorsed” by all of them because “the legislation is not the same in all the countries”.

 

What may happen is that this meaning would appear with a mark that makes reference to the country or countries where it is used, but, anyway, “homosexual marriage” will appear “without any doubt in the next edition of the Dictionary”.