Abstract

Linguistic communication through printed texts is asynchronous – lacking a biunivocal and reciprocal temporal correspondence between sender and receiver – and this is especially relevant in the case of dialogues designed to teach foreign languages. Imitating oral speech in written texts historically constitutes a whole discursive, prototypical yet not exclusive tradition of literary creation. Within the broad variational continuum of textual genres with written dialogues, those belonging to the field of Spanish as a Foreign Language face an added difficulty in their mimesis of spoken language: reproducing speech samples in linguistic diasystems that are different from those of the native language of the receiver. At the end of the 19th century, the importance of oral speech was emphasised in linguistics; however, it was only later that the diamesic aspects of speech were distinguished from the conceptual ones. Without claiming to expose anything novel, the origin of this unbroken teaching tradition will be outlined in order to analyse what samples of conversationality were created particularly for Italian-speaking Spanish learners from the end of the 19th century until the emergence of sound recording at the beginning of the 20th century, what type of “written spoken language” or “written orality” (“escritur(al)idad”, writtenness)2 tried to account, at least in part, for expressions belonging to an informal and relaxed conversation, and what linguistic theories supported the evolution of this variational continuum.