Diccionario Básico de Canarism

The most representative voices of the vocabulary of the Canary Islands

It is a collegial work, written by a group of academics belonging to the Lexicography Commission, which has counted with the collaboration of more than forty accredited specialists in speech, culture and nature of the Islands, including several professors of the University of La Laguna. For seven years, these researchers have made a huge intellectual effort to define scientifically, and in a manner adjusted to our natural and historical reality, each of the elements relating to flora, fauna, crafts, orography, popular traditions, professions, children's games, agriculture, livestock, fishing, popular music, etc., of the vocabulary of the eight populated islands of the archipelago.

This basic dictionary is the first of a series that will culminate in the General Dictionary of canaries, and has been conceived with an eminently school orientation, although the adult public may obtain important information from its pages, since it is a repertoire that registers the canaries most frequent and general of the Archipelago.

 The clarity of the definitions, the abundant examples of use taken from real speech and the illustrations (photographs and drawings) provided by the work, in addition to the careful editing, make this catalog a first order reference and a didactic instrument essential for the management of teachers and students of our linguistic community.

In the line of promoting the study and knowledge of the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands and of claiming its linguistic ways in the Spanish-speaking sphere, the Canary Academy of the Language points out, among its foundational and statutory aims, that of "recognizing that the canariety is a linguistic and cultural fact that is defined and explained as Hispanic, so it proclaims as its own both the rich variety of the language that unites us, as well as its literatures, and is committed to stimulate and spread the knowledge of each other " .

 In short, the Basic Dictionary of Canarianisms, the first institutional work of the Canarian Academy of the Language (as we know, there are already many that have been published under its editorial stamp), constitutes a valuable contribution to the rich lexical and cultural heritage of the language of Cervantes, García Márquez or Galdós.