Date of appointment: 28 june 1983.
By proposal of: Faculty of Language Studies, Translation and Communication.
Date of investiture: 1 february 1985.
Sponsor: Dr. Angel López García and Dr. Emilio Ridruejo Alonso.
Manuel Alvar López was born in Castellón in 1923.
He began his university studies in Zaragoza, finishing his Bachelor's Degree in Philosophy and Letters at the University of Salamanca to continue his doctorate at the University of Madrid. He was professor of Historical Grammar of the Spanish Language at the University of Granada and of Spanish Language at the Autonomous University and at the Complutense University of Madrid.
He served as visiting professor in different American and European universities. He was named doctor honoris causa in twenty-five Spanish, European and American universities.
He directed the National Institute of Philology, chaired the Society of Romance Linguistics and the International Association of History of the Spanish Language. He was a member of the Royal Academy of History and the Association of Linguistics and Philology of Latin America.
He was also part of the Drafting Committee of the linguistic Atlas of the Mediterranean and the Executive Committee of the Project for the study of the linguistic norm in the main cities of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. He was director of the Archive of Aragonese Philology, of the Journal of Spanish Philology, of Current Spanish and of Current Spanish Linguistics.
Works:
- The Aragonese dialect, 1953
- Hispanic dialect texts, 1960
- Traditional poetry of the Jews-Spaniards, 1966
- Medieval Spanish poetry, 1969
- Hispanic Dialectology, 1977
- History of the Spanish language (with Bernard Pottier), 1977
- Historical morphology of Spanish (with Bernard Pottier), 1983
- Language as freedom, 1983
- Manual of Hispanic dialectology: the Spanish of America, 1996
- Manual of Hispanic dialectology: the Spanish of Spain, 1996
- Judeo-Spanish, 2003 (posthumous work)
Awards:
- Menéndez Pelayo Prize for his work El habla del Campo de Jaca, 1947
- Antonio de Nebrija Award for Spanish spoken in Tenerife, 1957
- National Research Award of the CSIC for Structure of the Andalusian Lexicon, 1960 and Life of Santa María Egipcíaca, 1964
- National Prize of Literature by Aragon, Literature and to be historical, 1976
- Aragón Prize to Literature, 1988
- Ibn-al-Jatib Prize of the Junta de Andalucía
- Award Excellence in Research, State University of New York, 1985
- Ramón Menéndez Pidal National Award for Humanistic and Scientific-Social Research, 1993
- Nebrija Award for the defense of Spanish, 1996
- Commander of the Dominican Republic
- Great Medal of the University of Ghent
- Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise
- Gold Medal of the city of Zaragoza and the Provincial Delegation of Zaragoza
- Gold Medal of Aragon
- Gold Medal of the city of Granada
