Read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Online
Authors: Nicholas Ostler
Tags: #History, #Language, #Linguistics, #Nonfiction, #V5
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (79 page)
But liberal enlightenment did not stop here, with the attempt to shed Spanish vernacular light into the corners of minds supposedly darkened by indigenous mother tongues, and a growing freedom of civil society from obligations to the Church. Its next step, enforced by revolutionary wars in the early nineteenth century, was to be towards political independence for the Spanish colonies. Unsurprisingly, the forces that found continued Spanish rule most irksome were the Europeanised elites, the
criollos
, closest in their manners and language to the ruling classes, but for ever subordinate to them through the accident of their birth in the Americas. Although they were happy to recruit
mestizos
, blacks and Indians to their cause, they were almost never prepared to see the indigenous languages as badges of authenticity for the new nations they wished to establish: rather, the
criollos
offered everyone an undifferentiated citizenship based on a common language, Spanish. The nationalist movements of Latin America found it hard to embrace local languages, seeing even the bigger languages as sources of division, rather than of a unity alien to Spain. Evidently, language outcomes have varied in the face of local conditions, too multiform even to review here; there are at least as many stories as there are Latin American nations. We must be content to look briefly at just two cases, where Spanish has competed with large surviving indigenous languages.
In Mexico, since independence in 1821, the existence of Indians has always constituted a kind of intellectual embarrassment, their separate identity acting as a standing refutation of Enlightenment egalitarianism: ‘our political institutions do not distinguish between blacks, mestizos or Indians’.
53
In this respect, it is typical of most Latin American countries. In 1813, the revolutionary leader Morelos had appealed to the Mexica past to inspire his new Declaration of Independence: ‘Spirits of Moctehuzoma, Cacamatzin, Cuauhtimotzin, Xicotencatl and Catzonzi, as once you celebrated the feat in which you were slaughtered by the treacherous sword of Alvarado, now celebrate the happy moment in which your sons have united to avenge the crimes and outrages committed against you … ‘
54
But by the Lerdo Law of 1856, communal rights of Indians to their lands were dissolved. In 1916 M. Gamío wrote in
Forjando Patria
(’Forging the Fatherland’) that the solution to the ‘Indian problem’ lay in ‘attracting these individuals toward the other social group which they have always considered the enemy, incorporating them, blending the two together, in short creating a coherent and homogeneous national race unified both in language and culture’.
55
Paradoxically, in Mexico this view is characterised as
’indigenismo’;
it values indigenous language and culture, but only the two major prestige groupings Nahuatl and Maya, and only as a kind of national credential of past cultural glory. Less surprisingly, it has been the intellectual background to precipitate growth in the use of Spanish since independence: if in 1810 there were 6.7 million inhabitants, 45 per cent of them Spaniards or
mestizos
presumably speaking Spanish,
56
by 1995 there were 95.8 million, with fully 88 per cent of them first-language speakers of that language.
57
In Paraguay, by contrast, and uniquely, the bilingualism early established between Spanish and Guaraní has never begun to slip. It goes far back, to the earliest days of the colony, when Asunción was known as the ‘Paradise of Mahomet’ because of the highly favourable proportion of Spanish men to Guaraní-speaking women.
58
Uniquely in the Spanish empire, the country never had, even in its one city, Asunción, an urban elite who lived through contact with the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, rather than their own country. The isolation of the nation, cut off without a coastline or friendly neighbours, seems to have perpetuated this, even after independence. Every president of the country has been able to speak both languages. In fact, the two seem to have evolved a mutual dependency, like a stage double act, with Spanish cast as the smart, cultured brother (
culto, desarrollado
, or in Guaraní
iõarandu
) and Guaraní the lovable but unprincipled oik (
Guarango, que no tiene principios
, in Guaraní
tavi).
Guaraní did yeoman service, boosting morale and secrecy, in two wars against Paraguay’s neighbours in 1864 and 1932; and it has long had an association in people’s minds with nationalism and the Colorado party, as against the unsettling free-market philosophy of the Liberals.
59
Guaraní has been subject to official discouragement at times (when the Liberals have been in power); but at all levels of society it has gone on being a language learnt in the home, with Spanish the language acquired characteristically at school. In the 1967 Constitutional Congress, both were declared national languages, but Spanish was singled out as the official language. In 1996, of 5 million Paraguayans 95 per cent were said to be fluent in Guaraní, 52 per cent indeed monolingual in it; only 2 per cent were said to be monolingual in Spanish.
60
The general verdict on the penetration of Spanish into the Americas must be that it has had a narrow escape. Despite over two centuries of residence, and elite dominance, in the continent, Spanish-speaking society—constantly refreshed as it was by immigration from the Iberian peninsula—did not put down deep roots in the colonies. Until the late eighteenth century, the Spanish maintained themselves as an alien elite, with the
mestizos
as a growing body. They had benefited from the linguistic unification of their domains that had been achieved by their predecessors, especially the Mexica and the Incas, and used it to accelerate the economic exploitation of their conquests, and the missionary duties that they felt justified their presence. But precisely where they had enjoyed these advantages, they had not provided a universal lingua franca of their own. The case is strangely reminiscent of the Byzantine Greek domination of the Middle East. Aramaic remained the language of the people from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. And so the shock of Muslim conquest had been sufficient to blot out, within a couple of generations, all linguistic trace of a millennium of Greek rule. (See Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 257.)
How superficial the linguistic hold of Spanish could be on Spain’s colonies can be seen in the case of the Philippines, where a similar shock was delivered through defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898). We have already noted (see ‘An unprecedented empire’, p. 334) that this colony was in important ways unlike the Americas: it had not responded to Spanish conquest with a sudden epidemic-induced collapse of native population, and it had never attracted significant numbers of free-enterprise immigrants from Spain—or indeed any of the other Spanish colonies. As in the Americas, the local languages had been accepted as the medium for preaching the gospel; printing had started in the Philippines at much the same time as in the more advanced American colonies, Mexico and Peru: in 1593, a wood-block edition of
Doctrina Cristiana, en lengua espaõola y tagala
, a parallel text in Spanish and Tagalog, was its first product.
61
Since there were few Spanish settlers, and little serious economic development, there was small inducement for the Spanish language to be used outside official circles.
Nevertheless, there was a significant belated effort to spread knowledge of it. Carlos Ill’s royal
Cédula
of 1770 applied just as much to the Philippines as to the Americas, and on 20 September 1794 his successor, Carlos IV, issued a supplement to it, officially making instruction in Spanish free and compulsory for all. This never overcame the lack of resources needed to make it happen. The royal decrees kept coming, however. In March 1815 compulsory primary education in Spanish was imposed. In 1860, schools were instituted in the army: Spanish non-commissioned officers were to instruct their Philippine troops. In the nineteenth century, fairly respectable levels of school attendance were being achieved: in 1840, one child attended for every thirty-three inhabitants, a figure comparable with France in the same year: one child per thirty-eight inhabitants (and in Russia, one child per four thousand).
62
But the American dispossession of the Spaniards and occupation of the Philippines in 1898 revealed how fragile was the linguistic culture that the Spaniards had succeeded in planting. The census of 1903 showed that less than 800,000 (11 per cent) of the 7.5 million population spoke Spanish. Fifteen years later, the number who spoke English had already overtaken them: 896,258 for English, as against 757,463 for Spanish. Seventy years later, in 1988, the figures from the
Calendario Atlante de Agostini
put the Spanish speakers at 3 per cent;
63
this can be compared with the 51 per cent reported able to speak English in the 1975 census.
In the 1987 constitution, for the first time Spanish was no longer listed as an official language of the country. Tagalog (recast, and actively developed as ‘Pilipino’ or ‘Filipino’) now plays that role (available to some 62 per cent of the population, according to
World Almanac 1991
), with English ‘until otherwise provided by the law’. Spanish is now, along with Arabic, ‘promoted on a voluntary and optional basis’.
*
The progress of English over the prone figure of Spanish here cannot be separated from the general worldwide advance of English in the twentieth century, which will be examined in Chapter 12 (’The world taken by storm’, p. 505). Something too must have been due to the pre-existing network of schools available to the American incomers. Contrast the Spanish, labouring for centuries to build them up from a zero base. It is also true that much greater funds were available for US overseas activities than had ever been for those of Spain.
But the situation compares ironically with the contest of English and Spanish in North America in the same period, where if anything Spanish—in its version seeded to Mexico, Central America, Cuba and Puerto Rico—is growing at the expense of English, in many big cities and much of the south-west of the USA.
†
All these developments, however, tend to underline the true determinants of language spread: population growth and population movements. When an official language was an artificial thing, created by international elites, and spread as far as possible among local populations, it is understandable that the bigger budget should have created the bigger language. But when the population starts to grow, as the urban population of Metro Manila has, its language (Tagalog) has come to dominate the country just as its speakers have, English or no English.
And when a population starts to move towards that irresistible attractor, the US economy, as the Mexican and central Caribbean populations now are, new speaker communities will begin to crowd in, even if this means encroaching on the heartland of the most dynamic, and widely spoken, language in the world, English.
*
These fantasies were a mannered outgrowth of the heroic lays of early Romance three centuries earlier, such as
Chanson de Roland
, in Norman French, and
Poema de Mio Cid
, in Castilian Spanish. Many of the recent titles are listed in ch. 6 of Cervantes’
Don Quixote de la Mancha
(first half published 1605), where most of them are scheduled for burning. Enthusiasm for King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is part of the same European phenomenon. Sir Thomas Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
was published by William Caxton at Westminster in 1485.
†
Linguistically, Galician was (and is) much the same as Portuguese, divided from it by the course of the River Minho, and the political fact that Portugal became independent of Castile in 1143.
§
A third (non-Germanic) group, the Alans, went south-west, not east, even if a popular etymology for
Catalan
is ‘Goth-Alan’. The Vandals left their name in Andalusia, but passed on to Tunisia, and were largely erased by the subsequent Muslim conquest.
*
‘… they reached an islet of the Lucayas, which was called Guanahani in the language of the Indians.’ Columbus,
Diario de a bordo
, Friday, 12 October 1492, quoted by De las Casas (1957 [
c.
1530]). Columbus had at first thought he was within the domain of the Chinese Great Khan, and then (12 November) amid ‘the islands of India’. He no longer called the people he met
indios
after mid-December of that year, but the name had stuck (Sale 1990: 109).
†
‘… These islands are inhabited by
Canabilli
, a wild, unconquered race which feeds on human flesh. I would be right to call them anthropophagi. They wage unceasing wars against gentle and timid Indians to supply flesh… ’ Letter of Guillermo Coma,
De insulis meridiani … nuper inventis
, on Columbus’s second voyage, for Sunday, 3 November 1493.
*
Columbus’s world-view was informed by copious reading. We have seven of his books with his personal annotations, preserved to this day in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. They include works of Marco Polo and Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History
, and others more fanciful. His son Fernando also gave an account of his father’s reading, in chs 6 and 7 of his biography (Sale 1990: 15).
*
Although the contacts over the first few centuries always involved the projection of the mariners’ languages on to the peoples who received their landfalls, more recently we have seen that the new links can work in both directions, as immigrant communities from colonised countries gather in the homelands of once colonial powers, bringing their own languages with them.
*
The word
’ladino’
, indeed, carried over from its application to Moors in Spain, was a term often used of non-Spaniards who knew Spanish, first applied to Indians but later also to African slaves.
*
The people in Hispaniola, Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean islands, discovered in the previous generation, and immediately pressed into servitude by self-appointed Spanish masters, had spoken too many languages with too few speakers, and by and large died off too quickly, for a missionary effort to become established.
†
On the uniqueness of this, see Ostler (2004). Almost all the dictionaries are from Spanish into the alien language, not the reverse. The aim is to teach, rather than to learn: to encode a Spaniard’s thought, and so pass it to the Indians, rather than to try to decode anything novel that they might have to say.
§
Lengua mexicana
refers to the Nahuatl language, the principal lingua franca of the Aztec (Mexica) empire, and at first also of its successor empire, New Spain.
*
Other than to misidentify some phrases in it, and apply them permanently to the lands he was ‘discovering’ (and of course claiming in the name of the Spanish Crown).
Ekab kotoc
, ‘we are from Ekab’, became Cabo (cape) Cotoche, its name to this day. And, if we follow Diego de Landa (
Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán
, ch. ii, written
c
.1566),
ciu yetel ceh than
, ‘They call it land of turkeys and deer’, ended up as ‘Yucatán’.
*
Guaraní is so called for historical reasons, because the first people whom Europeans (with Sebastian Cabot in 1526-9) met who spoke this language were the Guaraní of the islands in the Río de la Plata and lower reaches of the Paraná. Its own preferred name is
avaõe’e
, ‘language of the men of the plain’.
*
The name is a nominalisation of the verb
nawati
, ‘to speak up’. We shall stick to the conventional spelling of this name, which is based on Spanish, and so pronounced
nawatl.
There are dialects, often called Nawat and Nawal, which (as their names show) differ in the pronunciation of this final consonant.
*
The x is authentically pronounced as English
sh
, and the stress falls on the i, followed by a glottal stop:
Mēšíhko.
†
The dates quoted are actually specified with equivalent accuracy in the original text of the
Crónica Mexicayotl.
The many different peoples of central America shared an elaborate system of interlocking calendar cycles which tolerated no vagueness, even if not always compatible with one another.
*
The phraseology is very similar to Motecuhzoma’s formal greetings to Cortés. See Prologue and Chapter 1, ‘An inward history too’, p. 15. Note also that, in accord with the conceits of Aztec etiquette discussed there, the junior party, the Aztecs, represent themselves as the grandfathers.
*
Quechua is basically spelt and pronounced like Spanish, but w and k are common. Hence õ is
ny
as in
canyon
, and j is
ch
in as in
loch.
An apostrophe after a consonant marks a glottal catch in the voice. A major exception to Spanish convention is that q is pronounced with the uvula at the back of the mouth, as in Arabic; and immediately before or after it i is pronounced more like [e], and u as [o]. This is the fundamental reason why the language’s name is given sometimes as ‘Quechua’, and sometimes as ‘Quichua’. The first u is in any case just a reminiscence of Spanish spelling: the pronunciation is more like [qecwa].
*
Something of the same seems to have happened with the Mayan languages, but with less conscious collaboration with, or aping of, Spanish literary forms. The Mayans had not recently been united under indigenous leaders. Nevertheless, they did develop a literature, but it was one that largely followed the norms and content of their older traditions. It includes the heroic myths of the Popol Vuh, the elegiac and tragic dialogue with a doomed warrior (Rabinal Achi), and the Books of Chilam Balam, which are traditional almanacs. It was a form of underground resistance to Christian domination.
*
Motolinía
was a Nahuatl pseudonym, adopted by him because it meant ‘poor’. The original name of this Franciscan friar had been Fray Toribio de Benavente.
*
The
encomienda
was an economic institution universal in the Spanish American colonies; it was a leasehold granted by the king, under which a designated
encomendero
was given full rights to exploit the labour of Indians on an estate, on condition only that the Indians received religious instruction.
†
‘Reverend Father, what case is it in?’
*
The echoes of this former majesty are widespread. Quechua was one of the eleven languages used by the Jesuits in their missions in Paraguay. It is also attested to this day, in small communities in the north of Chile, and Acre in the west of Brazil.
*
’para que de una vez se llegue a conseguir el que se extingan los diferentes idiomas de que se usa en los mismos Dominios, y sólo se hable el Castellano …’
, quoted in Triana y Antorveza ( 1987: 511).
†
The Portuguese Crown had expelled all Jesuits from Brazil in 1759. (See Chapter 11, ‘Portuguese pioneers’, p. 394.
*
Quotes from the Philippine constitution of 1987 (cited in Quilis 1992: 83).
†
The 2001 census figures place the Hispanic population of the USA at 37 million, 13 per cent of the total, and the largest minority in the country, having just now overtaken the African-Americans’ 36.1 million. The Hispanics are the only US minority to retain routine usage of their heritage language, Spanish, with two TV channels, Univisión and Telemundo, and over two hundred publications with a joint circulation of over 12 million (
El País
newspaper, Madrid, 23 March 2003).