MADRID – The first two volumes of the “Nueva gramatica de la lengua española” (New Grammar of the Spanish Language) will go on sale in Spain and Latin America on Dec. 4, the Association of Spanish Language Academies and Espasa publishing house announced Wednesday.

The “Nueva gramatica,” a monumental work that the 22 academies around the world have been preparing for 11 years and that, for the first time, shows regional differences, will be presented Dec. 10 at a ceremony presided over by Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia at the Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid.

The first two volumes of the grammar, the first to be produced since 1931, are dedicated to the morphology and syntax of the language and consist of about 4,200 pages.

During 2010, the publication of the volume on phonetics and phonology is also scheduled, and the head of this portion of the project is the secretary of the Royal Academy, Jose Manuel Blecua. It will be accompanied with a DVD containing examples of Spanish pronunciation in the different parts of the world where it is spoken.

Behind the production of the new work is an unprecedented collective effort involving “hundreds of people” who have participated to a greater or lesser degree, according to the guiding light of the project, Spanish academic Ignacio Bosque.

The basic text of the Grammar was approved in March 2007 at the conference of the academies held in Medellin, Colombia, and since then the academics working on the project have been honing the different chapters to ensure that they are “absolutely homogeneous” and have worked on such complex elements as the indexes and the examples illustrating grammatical constructions. EFE