Royal Spanish Academy but No English Academy? A Linguist’s Take

Published by Andrew Lillie, trained linguist and Spanish-English translator with over 30 years of professional experience.

As a trained linguist and Spanish-English translator, I’ve had a complicated relationship with the Real Academia Española — the Royal Spanish Academy. I respect it enormously. I’ve used its online dictionary at dle.rae.es countless times to nail down the precise meaning of a word or catch a nuance I might otherwise miss. But in the middle of a fast-moving translation job — en la brega, as they say in Puerto Rico — it’s not exactly my first stop. And the more I’ve thought about the RAE’s role in the Spanish-speaking world, the more I’ve come to question whether any institution should have the authority to tell 580 million people what is and isn’t acceptable in their own language.

Why does Spanish have an Academy and English doesn’t?

The English language is one of the most widely spoken in the world, with an estimated 1.5 billion speakers. Spanish is the official language of 21 countries and the first or second language of over 580 million people. So why does Spanish get a royal institution dedicated to policing the language, while English just… figures it out as it goes?

The short answer is history and culture. The longer answer is more interesting — and a little uncomfortable if you think too hard about what language authority actually means.

The Real Academia Española (RAE)

Founded in Madrid in 1713, the Real Academia Española is the official institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It’s made up of leading linguists, writers, and academics who work together to maintain what they consider the correct use of Spanish. Their flagship publication, the Diccionario de la lengua española, is the most authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language — updated regularly, free to use at dle.rae.es, and genuinely invaluable for understanding the full range of meanings a word can carry.

I’ll say it plainly: the RAE’s dictionary is the GOAT. The original. The most definitive source we have for the Spanish language. If you’re a translator, interpreter, or serious student of Spanish and you haven’t bookmarked dle.rae.es, do it now.

But — and this is a big but — there’s something a little authoritarian about an institution founded over 300 years ago trying to tell 580 million people spread across 21 countries and dozens of distinct regional cultures what words are and aren’t legitimate. The RAE has historically been slow to accept slang, resistant to loanwords from English, and skeptical of regional variations that millions of native speakers use every single day. That’s not preserving a language. That’s trying to freeze it in amber.

English: Gloriously Ungoverned

The English language has no RAE equivalent. No single body decides what’s a real word and what isn’t. Instead, English has a messy, democratic, sometimes chaotic ecosystem of institutions that each play a role.

The Oxford English Dictionary — continuously published since 1884 — documents how English is actually used, rather than prescribing how it should be used. That’s a crucial philosophical difference from the RAE model. The OED adds words when people use them, not when a committee approves them. Selfie became an OED word in 2013. Binge-watch in 2014. The language moves, and the dictionary follows.

The International Phonetic Association standardizes how sounds are represented across languages — useful for linguists and speech therapists worldwide, but hardly a language police force. The Modern Language Association and the British Association for Applied Linguistics contribute to scholarship and research. None of them tell you that your word isn’t a real word.

My Honest Take After 30 Years

Language is what people actually write and speak — not what a committee of academic specialists decides it should be. Slang, regional variation, borrowings from English and indigenous languages — these aren’t corruption or laziness. They’re language doing what language has always done: evolving to serve the people who use it.

When I was doing graduate work in the Translation program at the University of Puerto Rico, I encountered Spanish in all its glorious regional variation — Puerto Rican Spanish that would make a Madrid académico wince, expressions rooted in Taíno and African influences that no royal institution sanctioned. Was that Spanish less valid? Less real? Of course not. It was living language, doing its job beautifully.

The English language, for all its chaos and lack of central authority, has become the most widely spoken language on earth. Maybe there’s a lesson in that.

Use the RAE. Respect the RAE. But don’t mistake institutional authority for linguistic truth. The 580 million people speaking Spanish every day — in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, in San Juan and Equatorial Guinea — are the real academy.

Want to Explore Further?

The RAE’s dictionary is free at dle.rae.es — bookmark it. And if you want my full review of the best monolingual Spanish dictionaries, including where the RAE’s dictionary fits in the lineup, read this: The 5 Best Monolingual Spanish Dictionaries: A Trained Linguist’s Guide.

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Andrew Lillie is a trained linguist and Spanish-English translator and interpreter based in Oregon, with graduate degrees in translation from BYU and the University of Puerto Rico. He has worked professionally between Spanish and English since 1994.