Cuervo—who shared Bello's prognosis of the eventual fragmentation of Spanish into a plurality of mutually unintelligible languages (although unlike Bello he celebrated it)—warned against the use of the written medium to measure the unity of the language, considering it a "veil that covers local speech". This issue was documented poignantly in the 1935 treatise by Amado Alonso entitled El problema de la lengua en América (The problem of language in [Spanish] America), and was reiterated in 1941 when the scholar Américo Castro published La peculiaridad lingüística rioplatense y su sentido histórico (The linguistic peculiarity of River Plate Spanish and its historical significance). For writers of this viewpoint, the drift away from educated Castilian language was an unmistakable sign of social decay. Castro declared that the peculiarities of Argentine Spanish, especially the voseo, were symptoms of "universal plebeianism", "base instincts", "inner discontent, [and] resentment upon thinking about submitting to any moderately arduous rule". According to Castro's diagnosis, the strong identity of the Buenos Aires dialect was due to the general acceptance of popular forms at the expense of educated ones. Castro worries above all about the impossibility of immediately perceiving the social class of the speaker from the traits of his speech. The lack of the "checks and inhibitions" that the upper classes should represent seemed to him an unmistakable sign of social decay. Castro's text is typical of a widespread view that sees the unity of language as the guardian of national unity, and the upper classes as the guardians of language orthodoxy. Much of Menéndez Pidal's work is aimed at pursuing that goal, recommending greater zeal in the persecution of "incorrect" usage through "the teaching of grammar, doctrinal studies, dictionaries, the dissemination of good models, [and] commentary on the classical authors, or, unconsciously, through the effective example that is propagated through social interaction and literary creation". This kind of classist centralism—common to other colonial languages, especially French—has had lasting influence on the use and teaching of the language. Only recently have some regional varieties (such as voseo in Argentina) become part of formal education and of the literary language—the latter, thanks largely to the literary naturalism of the mid-20th century. Present-day issues The question of standard language took on new relevance with the rise of the mass media, when, for the first time, speakers of different dialects gained immediate access—by radio, television, and, more recently, the Internet—to language from