The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) is the official institution responsible for regulating Spanish Language, in order to keep its unity up in the Spanish territories.
The RAE began establishing rules for the orthography of Spanish language in 1741 and they were also gradually adopted by the Spanish speaking countries of Latin America.
It is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one other hispanophone nations through the Association of Spanish Language Academies.
The Academy was founded in 1713 by initiative of Juan Manuel Fernández Pachego, Marquis of Villena and Duque de Escalona and was modelled both on the Italian Accademia della Crusca (1582) and the Académie française (1635), with the purpose “to fix the voices and vocabularies of the Castilian language with propriety, elegance, and purity”. King Philip V approved its constitution on 3 October 1714, placing it under the Crown’s protection.
RAE’s authority was recognized on the language, because it is an hard work to regulate a so-spread language as Spanish is. It is often seen as a conservative, however, strives to maintain the formal language in tune with today, but not “close the door” to admission of new words.