“The curse of Babel”. Journalism chronicles of Spanish linguistic nationalism

One of the issues that is most controversial and that has the greatest social and cultural impact with regard to languages in Spain has been the so-called linguistic conflict, which has had a constant presence in the press and the media in general since the end of the 1970s. The press, as one of the most influential institutions in contemporary society, has been and remains a forum on linguistic issues, in all its facets. Based on the hypothesis that the metalinguistic texts in the press are a prime source for studying the creation and propagation of ideologies around language, we analyse the role of opinion articles covering language issues in the construction and reproduction of an ideological vision around Spanish which pits it, socially and linguistically, against the other languages of Spain. We study a corpus of 154 texts from a sociolinguistic and critical discourse-based standpoint, and analyse the foundations that provide the base for the construction and reasoning for the discourse on the languages of contemporary Spain and their relationship with the myths of language.