Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (76 page)

A single minister, Tlacaelel, presided over the first five decades of this bloody expansion. With an eye to the future, his policy was to burn all the books of conquered peoples to erase memories of a pre-Aztec past. Even though Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala had been bypassed in the Aztec advance, he imposed on them a curious agreement to conduct continual, but formally regulated, warfare, the
šoci-yāōyōtl
or ‘flower-war’, a regular engagement to do battle in order to capture prisoners for sacrifice. The word
šocitl
, ‘flower’, has a positive, ethereal value in Nahuatl imagery (for example,
in šocitl in kwīkatl
, ‘the flower the song’, meaning ‘poetry’, used in the verse that begins this section), but it is never free of association with the role of flowers in sacrificial offerings, just like human blood.

Familiarity with Nahuatl was spread all over central Mexico by this successful aggression of the Aztecs, but it does not seem to have happened at the expense of the languages of tributary peoples. Rather the Aztecs planted officials, especially tribute overseers, in all the major cities, and ensured that the subject peoples provided a corps of
nauatlato
, ‘interpreters’, to ensure effective transmission of the rulers’ wishes. Two Nahuatl speakers were among the officials from the subject Totonac territory who met Cortés when he first landed. And Nahuatl had clearly been spread by other, unknown, population movements prior to this: Cortés’s interpreter Malin-tzin, for instance, was a native speaker of the language, but she had acquired it in Coatzacoalcos, on the Caribbean coast 50 kilometres south of the border of the Aztec empire.

Before the Spanish conquest, Nahuatl should thus be seen as at best an effective lingua franca of a multinational and multilingual empire: the empire included areas where the indigenous population to this day speak Zapotec, Mixtec, Tarascan, Otomí, Huastec and Totonac languages, none of them related to one another or to Nahuatl. But in the fifteenth century, contact between the subject lands and the centre in Tenochtitlán must have been intense, at the level of tribute-gathering, and also through the network of
pochteca
, ‘merchants’, who also functioned as ambassadors and spies, and were so highly placed in the Aztec hierarchy that they could offer their slaves for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli along with the war captives offered by great warriors.

Language spread had been a far more complex process in the growth of the other great pre-Columbian empire, the Inca realm known as
Tawantinsuyu
, ‘Four Portions’. When the Spanish reached Peru, its empire—and its language—covered the whole altiplano to the west of the Andes, from Quito in the north to Talca in the south, linked by a royal road that stretched some 4,000 kilometres, and uniting under one government the Andean and Pacific strips of modern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and northern Chile. The language is known by its speakers as
runa simi
, ‘human speech’, but there was no accepted term for it when the Spanish arrived: Inca Garcilaso, a well-connected bilingual writing at the end of the sixteenth century, refers to it always as
la lengua cortesana de Cuzco
, ‘the courtly language of Cuzco’. The first published grammar, by Domingo de Santo Tomás, in 1560, names it, however,
la lengua general del Perú, llamada, Quichua
, following a tradition that had been attested for at least twenty years,
²⁰
and this has stuck. The term
qhišwa
actually refers to ‘temperate zone’ or ‘valley’, intermediate between the coast and the highlands. The general view at the time was that the temperate zone round Andahuaylas in Apurímac province, south of the city of Cuzco (
Qusqu
, ‘navel’—the Inca capital), had been the heartland of the language.
²¹

In fact, this seems to have been a later rationalisation.
²²
Quechua was by origin the language of a coastal region round Lima, with an oracle located at Pachakamaj (’earth-ruler’), the base of a seaborne trading community called the Chincha, who spread their language primarily as a trade jargon out towards the north, particularly up into the northern highlands round Cajamarca and into Ecuador, the area that was to be designated the
Chincha-suyu
, the most northerly portion of the Inca empire. This all happened in the first millennium AD, long before the Incas were a force to be reckoned with. The grafting of the language on to the growing Inca empire would in fact come almost as an afterthought, by a process rather similar to the adoption of Aramaic by the politic Persian emperor Darius (see Chapter 3, ‘The story in brief: Language leapfrog’, p. 47).

The Inca story began far to the south, on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca, where a group speaking the Puquina [
pukína
] language had established a major centre now known as Tiahuanaco. It seems that in the first millennium, in concert with speakers of Jaqi [
háki
], another language to the north (the ancestor of modern Aymara, still spoken in Bolivia), they developed an inland trading zone to the north and west; this trade would have spread knowledge of the Aymara language, and its sisters Kawki and Jaqaru (which still survive vestigially south-east of Lima), over much of the area of southern Peru. It is visible in the archaeological record in a distinctive style of pottery, depicting a face surrounded by rays or serpents, which could be the creator god Viracocha. It is, in fact, still possible to find place names that stem from this period, for example Cajamarca itself (Jaqi
q’aja marka
, ‘town in the valley’).

The Tiahuanaco rulers, apparently finding their old home threatened by mud slides, then moved across or round Lake Titicaca, to set up a new base of command in Cuzco: this began the ascent of the Inca, immortalised in their mythology as the career of their first king, Manco Capac, who emerged from the lake, bearing a golden sceptre that would show where they should settle. (Only at Cuzco could it be plunged straight into the ground.) He came with his wife Mama Ocllo, and together (but respectively) they taught men and women the arts of civilisation. At this point, the Incas accepted Aymara de facto as the language of their kingdom, preserving Puquina as an elite language for court use. (Of course, it continued to be used by their ‘poor relations’, left behind south of Lake Titicaca.) Cuzco must have been a bilingual city. This situation did not change for some nine generations (from the Incas Manco Capac to Pachacutec), as the realm of the Incas was expanded east, south and finally northward.

Then, in the time of Inca Pachacutec, serious aggression began. Expansion northward brought the Inca domains into conflict with the Chincha: but the solution found was peaceable and extremely positive. Pachacutec (already married to his own sister) offered his son, the formidable Tupac Yupanqui, in marriage to a Chincha princess, and the result was a merging of the Inca and Chincha domains. This led to a switch of imperial language, from Aymara to Quechua, presumably reflecting a judgement on which was more widespread and useful in the combined Inca and Chincha domains. For a time, Cuzco became a trilingual city. This would have been much less than a hundred years before the Spanish conquest in 1528. Cuzco Quechua, for all its political importance, was still seen as a substandard variety, which interpreters from the north liked to look down on. The new language was then projected with the sudden, and extremely warlike, advances of the empire which, under Tupac Yupanqui, took it northward to Quito, incorporating the significant Chimú state on the way, and southward into Chile.

Father Blas Valera insists on the explicit language acculturation policies pursued by the Incas within their domains.

And Inca Garcilaso adds:

To these apparently benign methods, the Incas had added the harsher one of repopulating some areas with colonies of Quechua-speaking immigrant families, also known as
mitmaj
, ‘transplants’. These were sent with the aim of diluting and pacifying the original population. There were ten to twelve thousand of them, settled with some finesse:
²⁵
‘They were passed to other villages or provinces of the temper and manner of those from which they issued; because if they were from a cold country they were taken to a cold country, and from hot, to hot … They were given estates in the fields and lands for their labours and a place to make their houses.’
²⁶

Far less is known about the careers of the other languages that had become widespread before the advent of the Spaniards.

The altiplano of Cundinamarca in the northern Andes was largely monolingual in the Chibcha (or
Muysca
) language when the Spanish arrived in 1536; the area was not politically unified at the time, however, and with at least three major centres at Tunja (
Hunza
) in the north, Bogotá (
Muykyta
) in the south, and Sogamoso (
Sugamuši
), a major religious centre in the northeast, there was also some difference in dialects. The conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (like Cortés, another lawyer at large) had brought interpreters with him from the coast, but, in view of the coastal languages as they are now (for example, Ika, Kogi), it is unlikely that they could have communicated in anything like their own language: more probably, they had some knowledge of Chibcha from traditional trade links between the mountains and the coast. Although there was already a clear social hierarchy among the Chibcha, and military organisation associated with formal campaigns among the different centres (as well as their non-Chibcha-speaking neighbours), there is no evidence that the language had been spread by any political, military or economic influence. More likely, the language had simply been established by the tribes who had settled there. And their ethnic group had clearly been there for some time: closely related languages had evolved a couple of hundred kilometres to the north-east, among the Duit (nowadays extinct), and the Tunebo (also known as
Uwa
), who still live, and speak their language, on the eastern slopes of the Andes.