Andrés Bello López (Caracas 1781 – Santiago de Chile 1865), philosopher, linguist, poet and statesman, was born in Caracas, Venezuela, at a time of important reforms within the Spanish Empire that established new administrative units, promoted economic development and upgraded educational institutions. Bello was recruited at a young age by the colonial government, rising through the ranks until Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 precipitated the crisis that eventually led to the independence of Latin America. Due to the growing prosperity of Venezuela, and his own professional advancement, Bello was neither disaffected with the Spanish Crown nor possessed by revolutionary sentiment. He was rather representative of a significant number of native-born Spanish Americans who preferred gradual to radical change. It was in that context that Bello was commissioned by the Junta de Caracas (a provisional government modelled after the Juntas of Spain), to seek British support for the policies of the new political body.

Bello arrived in London in 1810, where he and the other members of the diplomatic mission (including Simón Bolívar) were generally warmly received. In official circles, however, the reception was cooler, given Britain’s anti-Napoleonic alliance with Spain in the Peninsular War. After the collapse of the Venezuelan government in 1812, Bello was stranded for several years without secure employment until he became secretary first of the legation of Chile (1821) and then Gran Colombia (1824). All along he composed poetry and conducted research on the history of the Spanish language, whose origins, as in the case of other Romance languages, he traced to the gradual loss of quantitative metre in Latin. Through hundreds of pages of transcripts from manuscripts, Bello documented the emergence of assonance until vernacular languages became fully formed. He paid particular attention to the Poem of the Cid, comparing the language of the text with various contemporary documents in order to determine its precise age and its connections to other compositions of the Carolingian era.

Bello’s search coincided with the flourish of nationally-inspired philology in Europe. In his case, there was also a personal and political search, as an expatriate who mourned the breakdown of the Spanish Empire and yearned for reconciliation between the Spanish monarchy and its insurgent colonies. These ideals proved untenable after the Spanish liberal revolution of 1820, the string of secessionist victories under Bolívar and José de San Martín, and the recognition of Spanish American independence by the United States (1822) and Great Britain (1825). Bello became a strong advocate of republican institutions from then on, writing an “Ode to Tropical Agriculture” that promoted civic values and the rule of law.

In Chile, where he moved in 1829, Bello became an influential statesman and intellectual. From 1831 until 1861 he was a key foreign policy adviser to three presidents, a senator for three successive periods of nine years from 1837 on and the founder and president of the University of Chile from 1842 until his passing in 1865. In addition, he authored the country’s main international-law text, Principios de derecho internacional (1832, 1844 and 1864), and masterminded the Civil Code promulgated in 1855, which became the law of the land in 1857 and is still in use in Chile today.

The significance of Bello’s experience in Europe lies in his use of material in the British Museum and his immersion in the climate of philological interest during his London residence. His study of the diffraction of the Romance languages after the fall of Rome informed his view of linguistic and cultural relations between Spain and its former colonies. Contrary to more radical anti-Spanish views advanced at the time, Bello recommended that cultural and linguistic ties with Spain be maintained. He managed both Chile’s establishment of diplomatic relations with Spain in 1844, and the foundations of a university-based national historiography that continue to include the Iberian past.

Perhaps Bello’s most enduring accomplishment, motivated by his desire to keep the region united in one key respect, was the wide Spanish American acceptance of his Gramática de la lengua castellana para el uso de los Americanos (1847), a book based on his decades of experience studying the evolution of languages in Europe. From his perspective, the durability of a language far exceeded that of any political system, thereby providing a useful model for national development. The key to this resilience resided in the capacity of language to adapt to changing circumstances, be they of a social or a political nature. Most importantly, language was a vehicle of communication, a purveyor of past traditions and a source of creativity and innovation. Despite political independence from Spain, Bello’s agenda ultimately led to the creation of national academies of language affiliated with the Royal Academy in Spain (22 at present), and to a language commonly spoken by 580 million people around the world.