Between spelling rules and usage in official writing in the 18th century: a study of graphic variation in three subcorpora

Abstract

Until recently, the Spanish language of the eighteenth century had been neglected because it was considered a period of stabilisation, as it coincided with the founding of the Royal Spanish Academy (1713) and its concern for the standardisation of spelling. Within this framework, the present study aims to analyse some spelling conventions attested in the consonant system of mid-18th-century documents found in the Municipal Archive of Castellón and included in the INCOM corpus. These manuscripts are compared with others from the central and southern areas of the peninsula with the same typology and dating. Thus, it is possible to verify the extent to which the Academy's orthographic standardisation had an effect on official writing in the Kingdom of Valencia. In these documents, therefore, it is possible to observe the coexistence of different spelling trends that were socially accepted at a given time, which allows us to conclude that we are dealing with a moment of standardisation in progress (Ramírez Luengo 2013).