Articulo_2_EN_Doxa_29

1. Introduction

The press is currently one of the media that gives the greatest dissemination to the spread of knowledge and ideologies (van Dijk, 2006: 59; Marimón and Santamaría, 2019), both from a discursive and metadiscursive point of view, (Cameron, 2003: 448; Johnson and Milani, 2010; Guerrero Salazar, 2019a and 2019b).The selection of news depends on the press which gives rise to the different evaluations provided, especially through opinion journalism, where linguistic attitudes are fundamentally manifested.

Through journalistic texts we can see that there are different perspectives between what language “should be” - according to the criteria established by the Academy - and what “it is” in a given social area (Fajardo Aguirre, 2011: 55), because in these texts linguistic uses are debated, the perception that speakers have about them and the society in which they are produced and received. In this way, different positions, individual or collective, are presented, especially in terms of acceptance or reprobation of certain usages or, as is the case at hand, dictionary definitions which affect women.

The press, therefore, in addition to spreading different attitudes towards linguistic aspects related to sexism (Llamas Saíz, 2013, 2015, Guerrero Salazar, 2019a), contributes to the creation of a certain imaginary about feminism and language, that is, a dominant discourse in this regard (Guerrero Salazar, 2019b). To this is added the fact that many of the texts published in the daily press convey expert knowledge about the language, which reaches a heterogeneous audience with varying degrees of instruction. From this point of view, they can be considered an example of epistemic discourse related to power and the transmission of values and ideas about language. They are, therefore, an essential instrument in ideological reproduction and in the creation of social representations (van Dijk, 2003; Pardo Abril, 2007: 94). Therefore, one of the keys is to determine who can access the creation and transmission of these journalistic discourses, to whom they are addressed, what they are about, when they appear, in what context, and who can participate in a certain communicative event by performing what roles (van Dijk, 1996: 86).

Although the press and the social networks constitute the most recurring platform for the debate on the topic of “women and language”, the media discourse in this regard encompasses multiple facets that have not yet been addressed in depth, including the discourse that is generated when the academic dictionary is taken as a reference point, an aspect that will be analysed in this article.

The dictionary has been chosen as the object of debate in the digital media because it is, at the same time, a reflection of a reality and a model of the reality it conveys (Forgas Berdet, 1999). If language is the main shaping vehicle of ideology, the dictionary becomes the recipient of that ideology, which can be analysed both by the macrostructure (the compendium that binds the choice and selection of terms together) and by the microstructure (the definitions and the labels and examples that accompany the linguistic units). As Rodríguez Barcia (2012: 140) pointed out: “The lexicographical repertoire continues to represent a reference as a work that gathers much of the knowledge of its time from the codifications of reality”, one of whose most relevant implications is “the communication of ideological knowledge”.

The fact that the academic dictionary is considered an authority for the majority of language users explains the interest that certain groups have in influencing it through varied demands to the Academy requesting changes in certain definitions that are felt to be discriminatory, derogatory or offensive. The press echoes the pressures that the RAE is receiving in this