Abstract
The article discusses difficulties with the codification of Spanish. It analyses diverse relevant aspects of the issue: territorial and social varieties of the language, complex historical connections between European and American Spanish (for a long time treated as a centre-periphery relation), absence of a fully-fledged theory of the norm of standard Spanish, the sheer size of the Spanish-speaking territories, etc.
The article then proceeds to analyse the inadequacies of existing theories applied to this problem. After assessing the possibilities of applying the recently introduced polycentric norm to various language levels, the article concludes by hailing this concept as a significant step forward in the history of the codification of Spanish.