Espanyol??!!

Wow!!Thank you all for your replies!!'ll be spending a month in Chile,Bolivia and Peru and am a little bit confused!!Anyway thanks again!!Muchas gracias!!

even the Real Academia Española has changed their mind about this (español = castellano). They now say the proper name for the language is español and castellano should be reserved for the dialect of Spanish spoken in the region of Spain known as Castile.

Interesting that this is at odds with the Spanish constitution, which says "El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado".

alan1972, #11, Not at odds at all! Since Spain has a number of quite different dialects of Spanish (although the folks who speak them call them separate languages), so the Spanish constitution MUST define which is the official language of State, and defines that as castellano. The translation for "El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado." is "Castilian is the official Spanish language of Spain."

This pretty much says that the castellano dialect is the only one to be used in official documents and doesn't disagree with what the RAE says at all.

Since Spain has a number of quite different dialects of Spanish (although the folks who speak them call them separate languages)

Which dialects/languages are you referring to?

alan1972, #13, Spain has quite a number of romance (latin based) languages, most considered by international linguists to be (nowadays) just dialects of Spanish, however, until the Franco years when they were deemed illegal and heavily suppressed, they were really separate languages. Since Franco, the illegality and suppression have ceased and some are making somewhat of a comeback.

The Wickipedia article lists three of these that are recognized by the Spanish government, Galician and Catalan are romance based and Basque, which is a true separate language, not related to Latin or Spanish. The other two that are recognized by the Spanish government are Aranian and Valencian.

There are several others however, Andalucian, Extremadurian, Murcian, Canarian and Aragonese. All of these were separate languages at one time or another, but they have fallen into such disuse that they are now considered just dialects of Spanish. After all, Castilian has been the "official" language of Spain since 1492. That means that all those languages have been ruled by speakers of the Castilian dialect for more than 500 years.

As far as your quote from the Spanish Constitution, here is the section about language in full:

Artículo 3 de la constitución española

1 El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla. 2 Las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas Comunidades Autónomas de acuerdo con sus estatutos. 3 La riqueza de las distintas modalidades lingüisticas de España es un patrimonio cultural que será objeto de especial respeto y protección.

In which book?

La ciudad y los perros

Please tell me if I'm wrong, but that was the perception I obtained reading it.

hmmm... that was the second book I had read in my life, first one was "Cien años de Soledad" of Gabo (García Márquez), and I was like 13 years old...
I remember I was just amazed with this two genius of the Latinamerican Literature...

As a peruvian teenager I didn´t found that approach at all. He wrote that novel when he was living in Europe...maybe that had influenced him at some point... I don´t know, I will have to read it again and found out about that.

Have you seen the movie?... Francisco Lombardi won as best director in 1985 the Festíval of San Sebastian in Spain.