Por Redaccion 
El Council of Government has taken note of the reissue of the ‘Andalusian Vocabulary‘ by Antonio Alcalá Venceslada, edited by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) in 1951. It is the most comprehensive collection of Andalusian words, a key work to understand the linguistic richness of Andalusia and whose recovery is evidence of the commitment of the Andalusian Government to the preservation and dissemination of Andalusian intangible heritage.
The Andalusian Government will distribute it, through the Ministry of Educational Development and Professional Training, to the school libraries of educational centers in Andalusia, so that it can become a reference material for the younger generations of Andalusians with the aim of bringing the identity signs of Andalusia and our own language closer to the students, without any complexes. For this purpose, the work of the Spanish Language professor at the University of Malaga, Francisco Manuel Carriscondo Esquivel, an expert in the study of the work, has been enlisted.
This work originates from the 1930 call for the ‘Conde de Cartagena’ Awards, through which the RAE sought to reward a text that compiled the vocabulary of a Spanish-speaking region with new words that were not in the Academy’s Dictionary or, even if they were, had a different meaning from those given in it. The winning work was that of the Andalusian Alcalá Venceslada, which was published in 1934 in an edition illustrated by the now-defunct ‘La Purísima’ printing press in Andújar (Jaén), the author’s hometown.
The second edition, from 1951, published by the RAE itself, had 17,547 entries, a significant growth compared to the 4,254 entries of the 1934 edition. This second edition is considered definitive by the author, not only for including this considerable increase, but also for including an appendix with terms that the author continued to compile between 1941, when the ‘Conde de Cartagena’ Awards jury made its decision, which once again awarded the work, and its publication ten years later.
From a philological point of view, the second edition of the Andalusian Vocabulary represents the author’s effort to make an approximation to the phonetic transcription of the pronunciation of the different peculiarities of Andalusian dialects. One of them is the use of conventional Spanish graphemes to indicate aspiration, as seen in words transcribed with both an initial h- and a j- (hamacuco/jamacuco, hambrera/jambrera ‘hungry’ for example).
It also highlights the ethnographic interest due to the large number of words dedicated to documenting the material reality, fauna, activities, tools, and utensils specific to the most traditional jobs in Andalusia at that time, with a special focus on agricultural and livestock tasks, fishing, blacksmithing, carpentry, or cooperage. Thus, Alcalá Venceslada’s work is closely linked to Andalusia being the Spanish region best represented in the RAE Dictionary.