to the use of the language". In 1771 a Grammar of the Spanish Language was published. One area of the language the Academy sought to fix was its orthography. Because of the growing distance between spelling and pronunciation, a concern for spelling reform had developed in the 17th century. This culminated in the 1741 publishing of the Academy's Orthography of the Spanish Language. Between then and 1815, the Academy carried out a significant number of spelling reforms, until Spanish orthography essentially reached its modern form. In the case of coda labial and velar consonants, the Academy typically ruled in favor of variants, like , which maintained those consonants. That said, in some cases, like 'subject', the simpler form prevailed, in other cases both forms survive with slightly different uses, like 'respect'. In some cases with the prefixes, like 'dark', variation persists, although the simpler forms appear certain to prevail. When coda velar or labial consonants followed a nasal consonant, as in 'soon', the middle velar or labial was simply dropped. In the 19th century, as the various republics of Latin America became independent, the use of Spanish was connected to nationhood, and numerous constitutions recognized Spanish as the official language of their respective countries. The Spanish language words used in the Latin American countries began to be recorded in dictionaries as "Americanisms", beginning in the 19th century. There is still some variation, especially lexical and phonological, in the current standard, and forms of address differ between different countries, with the informal second-person plural predominantly being used in Spain, and being used in much of Latin America. As mentioned above, there is still significant variation in the use of third-person clitic pronouns. While Latin America uniformly uses the etymological system inherited from southern Spain, there is much competition between that system and others in the written language of much of the rest of Spain. One hybrid system, which is mostly case-based except that can also refer to masculine human direct object referents, has become dominant in Spain today, although it only made it into prescriptive grammars in the 20th century. Uses which deviate from the etymological system are labelled , or the use of for a direct object, and , refers to the use of for an indirect object. Following a period of concern over the unity of the language, Latin American Spanish began to be taken into account in designing