Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Scholarly Grammar in Mallorca and Menorca: Methodological Tradition vs. Innovation

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, legislative activity to standardize the Spanish language produced school grammar in the Castilian environment that cornered Latin in favour of the living language, in the wake of the Real Academia Española. However, in Mallorca and Menorca the traditional Sempere’s method would continue, the cultivation of Latin as resistance to Spanish grammar. Although the versions of the Valencian classic as state pressure increased, replaced the supporting vulgar language, Catalan for Spanish, the maximum levels of Hispanicization typical of the time would not be reached. We analyze sociolinguistically, with a careful look at didacticism, the grammar and school notebooks in use on the two islands until the mid-nineteenth century: the manuscript versions of Sempere in Catalan in Menorca, and the adaptations in Catalan and Spanish present in Majorcan classrooms: analogies and differences. It is intended to demonstrate that the methodological continuity in school education allowed Catalan to survive in the classroom beyond 1821, the year of the compulsory assignment of Spanish.