Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (105 page)

Likewise, the cracking early pace of English-speaking immigration into North America was influential in promoting English over all the other colonial languages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (See Chapter 12, ‘Westward Ho!’, p. 481.) And as the exception that proves the rule, Canadian French established itself, and throve, through a deliberate policy of assisted emigration for French-speaking women. (See Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 414.) The later massive immigration to North America was an exception in a different sense: it did not diminish the now settled English-speaking tendency of the continent because immigrants did not, in general, move or settle in with others of the same language; as a result these later immigrants tended mostly to acquire English, rather than passing their own languages on to their new neighbours. Despite many community links, this trend prevailed.

Immigration is the basic seed of language spread, but very often the propensity of newcomers to settle, and so displace older populations with different languages, is compounded and reinforced by the greater fertility of the newcomers. Finding themselves at some sort of advantage over the natives, they turn out to have larger families, and hence in a few generations are more numerous than the indigenous population. This has very likely always been a concomitant of large-scale immigration—without some sort of advantage, whether in health, wealth or even acceptance of lower wages, it is difficult to see how any immigrant population can become established over residents—but it has been particularly clear in the early history of the USA, Australia and New Zealand, where the growth was meteoric and documented by census. In all these cases, the immigrants were introducing temperate-zone crops and livestock. One can conjecture, however, that similar factors must have played out very often in the past—for example, in favour of the first Semitic speakers in many parts of western Asia, when they first introduced arable crops into new territories that had previously known only hunters, gatherers and pastoralists. Larger families mean heightened demand for land, but also larger armies to take and defend it, and all this benefits the languages the farming immigrants speak. This is in fact nothing other than the ‘natural growth’ that we found responsible for so many large language communities in Chapter 13.

One factor that is often credited for language spread we have found of very little long-term effect. This is trade. Formal trade relations are of course of great antiquity, at least as old as written language. (We saw that the origin of written language in Mesopotamia seems to have been due to a reinterpretation of trading tokens (Chapter 3, ‘Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death’, p. 51).) But no community famous for specialisation in trade has passed its language on permanently as a vernacular, or even as a lingua franca, to its customers. At most such activity tends to infiltration of the language, or even diffusion, since the instances where merchants have set up permanently as immigrants into the customer community are rather rare. Carthage, which carried the merchants’ language Phoenician, or Punic, into a substantial part of North Africa would be one such rare example. In general, these merchants’ languages—other examples are Sogdian along the Silk Road, Arabic and later Portuguese in the Indian Ocean—do not make the jump from a restricted business use. When the market disappears, or others muscle in, the language too is dropped. So suggestions that English nowadays is benefiting from its position as the language of global business need to be received with some scepticism: English may well be today’s pragmatic preference, but trade patterns change over time, and a trade connection alone will not guarantee a language community.

However, merchants do not always just bring goods on their visits to exotic locations. Sometimes they bring with them a new faith, and either act as missionaries for it themselves, or bring vocational missionaries with them. These missions can be important vehicles of a new language, if the faith has such an association. The Sanskrit and Pali that reached South-East Asia in the first millennium AD came with Hindu and Buddhist traders or buccaneers; a thousand years later, other traders from India were bringing in Islam, while the first European merchants, mostly Portuguese, were offering them Catholic Christianity. Of these four religions, each with an attendant language, only Christianity—the least language-conscious—seems to have projected its language as a vernacular; while Sanskrit, Pali and Arabic have remained languages confined to worship, Portuguese actually became the first language of many converts, and survives to this day in popular creolised forms from India to Malaya. And the English East India Company, which had come to India merely in search of profit, stayed long enough for missionaries to build up their strength and end up teaching the population English too.

But missionaries are not always traders with an ulterior motive. Missions may themselves offer a major motive for travel to distant parts: and such pilgrim missionaries have spread many languages, especially in Asia. In the first century AD Buddhist monks rounded the Himalayas, through Afghanistan and the Pamirs, to take the Four Noble Truths to the Chinese, and with them sacred Sanskrit. In the eighth century Nestorians, coming all the way from Syria via Persia, reached the entrance of the same Silk Road, and through it brought Christianity—and at least briefly Aramaic—into the heart of China. They had already taken it to the southern tip of India. (See Chapter 3, ‘Second interlude: The shield of faith’, p. 88.) Muslims too had come along the same trans-Asiatic route to spread their faith, which survives, especially on the coasts of China, to this day; and Islam is unthinkable without Arabic. Just recently, in the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missions brought the first words in English into central Africa, and to most of the Pacific Islands. (See Chapter 12, ‘The world taken by storm’, pp. 507ff.)

Sadly, missionary motives are not always so peaceable. Put another way, dominant peoples sometimes feel an urge, usually conceived as a duty, to impose their faith on foreigners they have defeated, to ‘enlighten’ them. In extreme cases—not rare in the second millennium AD—the duty is sharpened into a righteous aggression: the believers must attempt to defeat their neighbours simply to impose their faith on them.

This ‘crusading’ motive seems particularly characteristic of the faiths derived from Hebrew revelation, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It has been mitigated for the Jews by the fact that they have almost always been in much smaller force than their enemies or neighbours, and hence can only endorse the doctrine nostalgically, recalling biblical tales of their early conquests. For Muslims, there was always the doctrine that
ahl al-kitāb
, Peoples of the Book—Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians along with Muslims themselves—were owed a special tolerance, and so a certain moderation was shown to most of those they defeated. It fell to Christians to try out the full rigours of waging aggressive and imperialistic wars in the name of religion.

The doctrine was forged in the crusades against Islam of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the Christians had insufficient advantage to create long-term dominance. But in the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even more in the Americas, forces were far less even. The kings of Spain and Portugal received formal authorisation to dispossess other kings, and establish their own empires, explicitly in order to extend the domains of the Catholic faith.
²
But it was one of the greater ironies of this global review to discover that all over Latin America it was the religious communities which tended to sustain use of America’s indigenous languages: Europe’s languages began to wipe the others out only when the special concern with and for natives lapsed. (See Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 373.) Whatever the Christians’ original intent, it was settlers, rather than missionaries or their crusading Faith, who spread languages.

Human nature may not change much, but in the last half-millennium—the period we have represented as Languages by Sea—some new factors have come into play which affected radically the capacity of languages to spread.

The first of these is global navigation. The motive for developing this was mercantile, a fifteenth-century European ambition to acquire Asian commodities, especially spices, more cheaply. The ambition was very soon fulfilled, but an immediate side effect was to operate in the reverse direction—the gradual establishment of speech communities of Europeans far away in Asia and the Americas, communities that very soon gained new members locally. It was no longer necessary for speech communities to be contiguous, or linked by brief cruises across familiar seas.

It is possible to quote forerunners for this breakthrough—the Chinese commerce with South-East Asia that briefly expanded to take in the whole Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century (see Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 147); the Arab, Persian and Indian traders who had taken the Indian Ocean for their domain in the early first millennium AD; the much earlier Polynesian mariners of the Pacific in their outrigger canoes, who island by island reached every habitable landmass there; indeed, the primeval navigators who many thousands of years ago made their way through the East Indies and across the Torres Straits to Australia. But none of these forerunners succeeded in mapping the whole world once and for all, providing the complete inventory of what lands there were to be discovered, and where they lay. In the sixteenth century, the world shrank from an open system to a closed and definite sphere, still dangerous but now for the first time manageable. Now it became conceivable that fellow-speakers could set up home on the other side of an ocean, indeed many oceans away: they might be hard to reach, but their address would be known. Though they were scattered across the world, contact could be maintained.

Once this network of discontinuous communities had been established, maintainable through regular sea traffic, the scope of inter-communal relations changed too. In the Americas, the onset of epidemic disease very quickly readjusted the relative size of resident and incomer communities, and in Latin America extensive interbreeding soon blurred the borders, linguistic and cultural, between them. As a result, the settler communities largely replaced, by incorporation or by simple displacement, the previous resident populations.
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Nothing new there, except for the continental scale of what was happening; something analogous must have happened, for example, when the Romans invaded Gaul, or the Saxons took over England. But in India and the East Indies, the indigenous community was not vulnerable to disease brought by the immigrants: on the contrary, the diseases endemic there kept the immigrant population small. The result was a persistently small minority community of outsiders, the Europeans, living on the edge of the resident population, but increasingly influential within it. This was a new situation and the response to it, the spread of a language by re-education, was new too.

Effectively, the outsider minority passed its prestige language on to the elite of the majority, not as a lingua franca, but as a symbol of a kind of cultural recruitment. The novelty of this development is underlined by the fact that it happened in British India, but not in the highly similar Dutch East Indies. Both the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie and the English East India Company had brought a Germanic language to a long-standing commercial market in South Asia; both had succeeded in displacing European competitors, the Portuguese or the French; both had attracted Protestant missionary camp-followers who were keen to spread their spiritual world-view to the local population. But the Dutch were content always to use the local lingua franca, Malay, as the language for their religion, and their administration. The
mijnheers’
own world was separate from that of their local suppliers, employees and (ultimately) subjects, and so it would remain. (See Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 395.) Only the British provided the means to switch to their own language, English. When they did this, they were yielding certainly to pressure from their own missionaries, but also from their home population and many elite Indians. The emerging new attitude to the colony demanded nothing less, seeing it not just as a place in which to make a profit, but as British India, to be developed as a part of Greater Britain.

This step turned out to open the way to English as a world language, available to any who wanted to take part in the Industrial Revolution, wherever they might live. The motives at the time may recall those of Archbishop Lorenzana, calling in the eighteenth century for the use of Spanish throughout Spain’s empire, not least as a duty to the education of the Indians. (See Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 373.) But he was really calling for the use of Spanish to be imposed, not conceded; and so it ultimately was, largely through neglect of education in other languages. The case of English in India did involve some symbolic withdrawal of government support for Sanskrit and Arabic; and the generalised use of English which followed has contributed to the closing of English-speaking minds, where foreign languages are concerned. (’After all, they all speak English, don’t they?’) But this spread of the language, ultimately worldwide, through what we have called re-education, was never an imposition; English remained the language of a small minority, and even among Indian nationalists its acquisition felt more like the development of an opportunity. It was a new and significant development in the history of language spread, and was later taken up as a deliberate policy by at least one other power, the French, in their empire’s conceived
mission civilisatrice.
(See Chapter 11, ‘The second empire’, p. 416.)

Another important innovation in language spread over the past five hundred years, and especially the last two hundred, was the growing role of technology. Civilisations are, by their nature, technology-driven; indeed, by one definition a civilisation is just a distinctive accumulation of technical innovations. And the spread of language had been advanced by technology before: recall how Akkadian’s availability in cuneiform writing on clay made it the diplomatic lingua franca of ancient West Asia (see Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 58), and how the alphabetic system invented by Phoenicians had provided the basis not just for a new elite role for Aramaic speakers as scribes in Assyria and Babylon, but in the end for administration and education throughout the world from Iceland to the East Indies.