Custodian of the Castilian language

Michael Mullan

Emilio Lorenzo Criado, philologist: born Puerto Seguro, Spain 10 June 1918; married (five children); died Madrid 2 July 2002.

As one of the "numbered academics" of the Real Academía Española (RAE), Emilio Lorenzo spent the last quarter of his 84 years as one of the chief custodians of the "purity and elegance of the Castilian language", and also championed correct English in Spain. Founded in 1713, the academy has only 46 members of his exalted rank, designated not in fact by numbers but by letters of the Spanish alphabet – Lorenzo was represented by the lower-case h.

Born in the tiny village of Puerto Seguro, Salamanca, Lorenzo was 18 when the Spanish Civil War erupted. While he was conscripted into Franco's army, his father was far away defending the doomed republic. The two were reunited after the war in Madrid, where Lorenzo took his first degree in philosophy and literature.

After further studies, in Munich, he completed a doctorate in modern philology and, after some years as a schoolteacher, was awarded a chair in Germanic and English at Complutense university in Madrid, where he ran a prestigious institute of modern languages and translation.

The English language was his second home and from the 1950s his most important writings dealt with its influence – sometimes helpful, sometimes egregious – on the language of Cervantes, spoken nowadays by 10 times the population of its mother country and exposed to the mixed blessings of globalisation.

One has only to flick through a Spanish newspaper to see a company that is a "líder" in its sector advertising for a director of "márketing"; the sports pages, of course, major on "fútbol" rather than the now obsolete "balompié" originally preferred by the RAE. A corner kick is "un córner"; the manager "el míster"; a penalty "un penalty", and so on. Ordering a gin and tonic, the correct "ginebra y tónica" might earn a blank look while "gintónic" will produce the desired results.

Lorenzo did not resist the acceptance into Spanish of words that other languages did better; but it annoyed him, for instance, to hear wild strawberries described as "salvajes" – a literal translation from English – when the pukka Spanish is "silvestre". He was elected to the RAE in 1980, but a bout of meningitis (which left him almost totally deaf) meant he could not take up his seat for more than a year. When he did so, it was with a magisterial acceptance speech on "the supposed sufferings and shortcomings of our language".

His most important books included essays on contemporary Spanish as "a language on the boil", or "at the crossroads"; he also wrote standard textbooks of English and Spanish, and among his translations were versions of the Nibelungenlied and Jonathan Swift. His later masterwork, Anglicismos hispánicos (1996), running to more than 700 pages, explored not only the infiltration of Spanish by loan words like detective, chip or bypass but the way that clumsily direct translations from English were giving existing Spanish words altered meanings or introducing dubious grammatical innovations. In some cultured Spanish circles, the definitively correct usage of a given term is known as its "emilio lorenzo".

At three universities, the Complutense, Las Palmas and the Menéndez Pelayo in Santander, Lorenzo was for many years in charge of some of the most popular – and rigorous – courses in Spanish as a foreign language.

Although an academic to his fingertips, Lorenzo was not the ivory-tower type: on the contrary, he kept a close eye on newspapers and popular culture to chart the evolution of the language. He was consulted on issues of house style by at least two quality papers, ABC and El País, where the cartoonist Forges keeps up a coruscating commentary on Spanish yuppiedom's infatuation with English, usually in a quaintly mutilated form. Even in his eighties, Lorenzo was senior consultant on a handbook of terminology in telephony and mobile communications.

His many honours included the German Grand Cross of Merit, the rank of Chevalier des Palmes Académiques and doctorates from Seville and Salamanca. Sadly, English academia does not appear to have fully acknowledged its debt.