La Royal Academy of the Language has recently released an application of its dictionary on mobiles and tablets. It is fully updated as it incorporates the latest accepted words in the field of new technologies. At the moment, according to various media, it has about 3.000 downloads a day, which is not bad at all.
Several writers and intellectuals from our country have once thrown their hands to their heads, absolutely scandalized, after verifying the kind of language that Internet users commonly use to express themselves in certain spaces throughout the Internet. Fernando Lázaro Carreter or Javier Marías , among many others, have strongly charged the inks against the emerging forms of communication, typical of new technologies, which has led a certain part of public opinion to defend that the Internet is a bad thing because “our language is being charged ”; when in reality, in many cases, what it does is just the opposite: load it from new meanings with terms that arise in the day to day and with which people deal with give it a name to acts or things that did not have it before.
However, as the function of the Royal Academy of the Language is to fix, clean and give splendor to the Spanish language, the vehicle par excellence of communication (at least in Spain) and as new technologies are characterized by being instruments or means for communication, essential today, the RAE has chosen not to be left out of them and has launched a dictionary, also essential, to consult any doubts that may arise when speaking or writing.
It is, as we say, an application developed by Grupo Planeta that is available for Android devices, as well as for iPad, iPhone and iPod. Its design is the simplest: contains, on one side, a text box to write the word about which we want information and, on the other, the different definitions appear, which are also those that consist updated on the RAE website. At the moment it is a download success and we hope that it continues to be the case, since the correction and enjoyment of the technologies should not be at odds.