The president of the Spanish news agency, Miguel Ángel Oliver, affirmed during the presentation in Brazil of the “New Urgent Style Manual” that this book is a “guide to democracy”.
“The new Stylebook of Agencia EFE is a guide to democracy. A stylebook of these characteristics cannot exist in a dictatorship,” he stressed in his closing speech at the round table ‘What is happening with Spanish in Brazil?’, which took place at the headquarters of the Cervantes Institute in São Paulo.
For Oliver, the New Style Book published jointly with Cervantes establishes a “more horizontal” power, leads the way and positions the Spanish language as a tool for everyone, which becomes a “guarantee of democracy”.
The president of EFE said that the first booklet of what later became the current manual was born in “the first shoots” of Spanish democracy, in 1975, when, after the death of Francisco Franco, a period of transition was inaugurated.
In this sense, he also highlighted the role of the EFE Agency in the promotion of the language, which every year introduces more than three million news items in different formats into the global information system, most of them in Spanish.
“EFE is a great introducer and greaser, it is the oil that moves Spanish at a global level. Together with the Instituto Cervantes, it is a weapon of the authentic diplomacy of Spanish in the world,” he said.
The Stylebook, whose first edition was published in 2011, has a different structure, revises and rewrites much of its material and incorporates a multitude of aspects that have appeared or gained importance in recent years in the newsrooms of EFE and all media, such as social networks or artificial intelligence.
The role of Spanish in Brazil
During the debate prior to the intervention of the president of the Agency, the journalists who participated in the round table agreed that the Spanish language is gaining ground in Brazil, despite the fact that some political decisions led to a reduction in the number of Spanish students in the South American giant.
“Despite the fact that Brazil has borders with most Latin American countries, Spanish has suffered many ups and downs in recent times,” explained the moderator of the debate, the director of communications at the Cervantes Institute, Sonia Pérez Marco.
In this case, the reform promoted by Michel Temer's government in 2016, focused on secondary education, in which the compulsory teaching of Spanish in schools was abolished, was cited as one of the main reasons for this drop.
Fernanda Godoy, editor of the newspaper Valor Economico, indicated that 60% of high school students choose to take the university entrance exam in Spanish and not in English.
The same argument was made by Carla Jiménez, editor of the Politics section of UOL, who stated that “Spanish is going to be imposed one way or another” and that this will probably happen “from the bottom up”, that is, as a demand from the people towards the political class.
Both highlighted culture as a vehicle of language, citing the case of Brazilian singer Anitta and her collaboration with Luis Fonsi or the films of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.
“Cinema is another inexhaustible source of affective relationship with Spanish. Brazilian society consumes Spanish and finds it natural,” said Jiménez.
On the other hand, the head of EFE in Brazil, Manuel Pérez Bella, stated that Spanish in Brazil has become an issue of political polarization between “left and right”, in which the more conservative parties defend the teaching of English and the more progressive ones prioritize Latin American integration and seek to promote Spanish.
LINK: https://agenciaefe.es/miguel-angel-oliver-el-libro-de-estilo-de-efe-es-una-guia-de-democracia/
