The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) has announced that the tilde should only be used in the adverb ‘only’ when there is a risk of ambiguity. This has been agreed by its members in the plenary meeting celebrated this thursday after the controversy that arose around the tilde with the adverb ‘solo’. Academics have approved keeping the “modification” made last week.

“Today has been unanimously ratified the position of the Academy regarding a subject that began to be debated ten years ago and has placed in different positions to both writers and grammarians. But no one has given their arm to twist there are no winners no matter how much some public communications appear otherwise”, the director of the institution, Santiago Muñoz Machado, explained at the conclusion of the plenary session.

The RAE explained last week that “the option to check or not ‘only’ remains when there is a risk of ambiguity” and introduced the expression “in the judgment of the one who writes” so that whoever writes values “whether there is ambiguity or not”. Thus, he stressed that the speaker “will have to justify” the use of the tilde if he perceives the risk of ambiguity”. “The rule leaves open the possibility that never use the adverb ‘only’ or administrative pronounswhich is the most advisable option”, he pointed out.

This position has been ratified “unanimously” -and not as happened in the previous plenary session, where it was also said that unanimity existed, but in reality it was “by consensus”-, and Muñoz Machado affirms that all the academics are satisfied with the modification of the wording of the norm. “It’s just that some academic interpretations, which I don’t know if he still considers, go towards a change in the norm and others just a wording change”has qualified

“Was a lot of haste when communicating the agreement and maybe some expressions in tweets were not the most accurate: some academics They see this very important step in line with what they have claimed and they have taken it as great personal success and victory of their positions, and other academics who are more in favor of the established rule have stated that, in their opinion, there are no variations”, explained the director, making visible the distanced positions between writers and grammarians.

“There are no tildist or anti-tildist positions”

“There are no tildist or anti-tildist positionswe are people with a different background: there are a third of grammarians, a third of novelists and a third of people with different professions but we get along really good and we carry out work very normally”, defended Muñoz Machado.

The director of the RAE has added that practically all the writers and grammarians have intervened and that Arturo Perez-Reverte has been one of the “most active”. The latter has been one of the last to leave the headquarters of the RAE after the plenary session and after leaving it he has joked with the media. “I have no idea, I don’t know what you’re talking about”have been the words that the writer has pronounced.