Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (77 page)

Even less is known about the background of Tupí-Guaraní, but the language was spoken far more widely across lowland South America; forms of it have been found as far north as Suriname, north of the Amazon, and to the west in pockets on the Brazilian and Peruvian borders of Colombia. It was spoken (as Tupinambá) all over the centre and south-east of Brazil, in eastern Bolivia (known as Chiriguano), and in Paraguay (as Guaraní). Its spread may have been linked to the progress of Mesoamerican-style farming across the continent, of maize, beans and squash, supplemented with potatoes, manioc, peanuts and chili peppers.
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And of the Mapuche past, even less is known or can be inferred. They maintained their independence until the second half of the nineteenth century; and so Spanish contact with them came too late for any use of their language, Mapudungun, as a
lengua general.
The use of a single language across their extensive territory suggests that they were a single group who had taken possession of a not particularly fertile region, and were thinly spread across it.

We must now turn to the policies pursued by the Spanish to organise their colonies linguistically. But before we do so, it is worth pointing out that there is a clear correlation between the degree of political organisation of a group with a widespread language, and the development of a literature after Spanish contact (which took advantage of the transmission of a Romanised writing system). There are substantial literatures in Nahuatl and Quechua which date from the period immediately after the conquest, often written by immediate descendants of the elite who had ruled Mexico and Peru before.
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Aymara, Chibcha and Guaraní, by contrast, did not develop an indigenous written literature, even though they had each been given a written standard by missionary linguists:
³⁰
as far as we can see, literature in the languages remained confined to the productions of the Spaniards, and largely to support the process of Christianisation.

In the papal bull of 1493 issued by Alexander VI,
Inter Caetera
, which formed the legal title of Spain to its colonies, and in the instructions issued to Columbus by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the conversion of the natives was enjoined as the supreme objective in building the Spanish empire in the New World. Already in 1504, Father Boyl, who had been sent out with Columbus on his second voyage, was explaining to his royal masters that the spread of the gospel was being delayed by lack of interpreters.

Nevertheless, speedy progress was made with the Christianisation of the Caribbean, largely through Spanish. As we have seen, there was a babel of different languages in use in the Caribbean, and with no lingua franca the only alternative would have been to use each and every one of them. Cardinal Cisneros in 1516 required sacristans to teach the children of chieftains and important people to read and write, ‘and to show them how to speak Castilian Romance, and to work with all the chiefs and Indians, as far as possible, to get them to speak Castilian’.
³⁴
Twenty copies of Nebrija’s
Arte de la lengua castellana
were delivered to Hispaniola in 1513, sent from the governmental Casa de Contratación de Indias. The process was effective in its intermediate goal of spreading Spanish. There are many reports of native chiefs who were masters of the language, and literate in it.
³⁵
But in the slightly longer term, the real aim, a new community of Christian souls, was frustrated by the disconcerting tendency of the Indians to die off, under the extreme stress of Spanish exploitation, followed up by wholesale import of black slaves from Africa. At any rate, in a situation of catastrophic collapse of population, and no segregation of Spaniards from Indians, it is unsurprising that only the Spanish language survived.

The spread of Spanish power to the continent created a very different situation. Partly by virtue of the campaigning fury of Father de Las Casas, partly from the sheer fact of depopulation, there was already a guilty sense of what rampant exploitation had done to the largely innocent islanders of the Caribbean, and (at least in the Church and the royal court) a determination that this should not recur. The religious orders spread out across the new colonies, and immediately endeavoured to reach the inhabitants in their own languages.

Because of the prior activities of the Indians which we have just reviewed, they found that in many of the territories the linguistic situation was much more manageable than it had been in the Caribbean. Some languages were already widespread; and even if they were not known to the whole population, everyone knew of them, and usually found them easier to acquire than the wholly alien Spanish.

After a generation of work in the field, a direction was issued by the royal court on 7 June 1550, to the effect that the new citizens of Spain should as soon as possible be taught the Spanish language:

There was immediate resistance from the churchmen called to act on it. The nature of their arguments is clear from the quotations that head this section. Means for the propagation of the faith were already to hand, they said, and these used the languages widely spoken in the major centres of population. It seemed pointless to try to substitute Spanish. And even where there was not an appropriate and effective
lengua general
, they still felt that native languages were the best for their purposes. The Archbishop of Bogotá wrote to the king on 12 February 1577:

There are those who say that the Church was not wholly disinterested in its promotion of the use of indigenous languages here. Maintenance of contact through the
lengua general
or other less accessible languages meant that the priests remained the sole effective channel between the pure-blood Indians (99 per cent of the population of Mexico at the turn of the sixteenth century, and still 55 per cent in 1810)
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and the rest of the world. Besides holding them as some sort of power base, they could shelter them from the pernicious doctrines of the Reformation which were circulating in Europe, and to some extent protect the Indians from rapacious Spanish colonial interests. But there is no evidence that the Church deliberately restricted access to Spanish: rather, they made it part of the curriculum, along with Latin, in all their schools. It simply failed to catch on among Indians, largely isolated as they were in remote settlements, or in segregated communities (
reducciones
), with few non-bilingual Spaniards to talk to.

In any case, the reaction of the Spanish Crown was emollient. No immediate enforcement of the
Real Cédula
was attempted under Carlos V. Some of the clergy in America were convinced that efforts should be made to make Spanish compulsory ‘within some adequate term’, because there was no clear, standard terminology in which to preach.
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In 1586 Felipe II commanded the viceroy of Peru to look into the matter, and take whatever measures seemed best; but in 1596 he rejected a draft
Cédula
which would have provided for the compulsory teaching of Spanish to Indians in New Spain, along with prohibition of any of their chiefs talking to his people in their own language, adding the personal note: ‘Consult me on this and the whole issue here.’ When on 3 July the
Cédula
was finally signed, it contained instead the instruction to ‘put in place schoolmasters for those who would voluntarily wish to learn the Castilian language’, but to ensure that ‘the curates should know very well the language of the Indians whom they have to instruct’.

The result, maintained for the next two centuries, was very much the continuation of the status quo: Spanish in the cities, and increasingly in
mestizo
society; but elsewhere the
lenguas generales
were in use, and failing that other indigenous languages. The outcome in the long term seems to have depended on the prevalence of separate Indian settlements: for example, in New Granada, where these were few, the use of Chibcha gradually died out despite its recognition as an official
lengua general
, and Spanish replaced it. Nevertheless, even here Indian languages survived in remote areas. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Peru and Paraguay the
lenguas generales
flourished, in speech and in writing, even as small communities went on speaking their own languages.

What now occurred was a process whereby the content of the Spanish world-view was conveyed through the pre-existing languages of wider currency. The Spanish were spared the trouble of teaching their own language widely, or waiting a few generations for knowledge of it to spread; instead, they acquired, and turned to their advantage, the old languages, whether these had been spread by previous ruling powers—notably the Mexica, the Inca and (to a limited extent) the Chibcha—or were simply pre-existing languages of trade and intercourse—notably Aymara in southern Peru and Bolivia, and Guaraní in Paraguay.

The most flourishing of these in these first two centuries of Spanish rule was certainly Nahuatl. Since Spanish rule in Mexico created a ‘republic of the Indians’ separate from that of the Spaniards, and with separate courts, administrative use of the language was thriving. Moreover, there was not only a major effort by Spanish clergy to translate and publish liturgical material, supplemented as we have seen with linguistic analysis to aid in the training of Spanish learners; there was soon also a literature that recreated and retold the pre-Hispanic history of the country. This included above all the writing of history and of lyrical poetry. Besides the old genres, however, new ones were added: psalms, such as this one, composed by the Nahuatl encyclopedist, Fray Bernardo de Sahagún: ‘The precious jades that I also shape with my lips, that I also have scattered, that I have uttered, are a fitting song. Not only are all these a gift for you, beloved son, you who are a son of the holy Church; even more are your due … if you follow Christianity well as a way of life…’,
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and the
auto
, or religious play, which continued the Mexican dramatic tradition in the service of the Christian faith. Motolinía, one of the heroic group of twelve missionaries first sent to convert Mexico,
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recounts with gusto a number of such plays performed in 1538 and 1539, including the Annunciation, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the Crusaders’ Capture of Jerusalem, presumably all scripted and directed by friars, but performed exclusively by Indians.
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Seven generations later the tradition was still alive: in 1714 the Tlaxcalan writer Juan Ventura Zapata wrote a somewhat more imaginative work, the
Invention of the Holy Cross
, which contains a scene where the Aztec god of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, confronts the Roman emperor Constantine.
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To this day, in the town of Tepoztlán, a pageant of Christian conversion is presented every year on 8 September: