Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (80 page)

Surveying the world’s current top ten languages by population (the full top twenty are identified and discussed in Chapter 13), we note that no less than six of them have spread through the expansion of European global empires in the past five centuries: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German and French. The spread of Spanish, the earliest of these, distinguished by the leading—though somewhat spoiling—role of the Catholic Church, we have just reviewed. The spread of English, the most spectacular, where global market enthusiasm seems to have taken over just as national dominance left off, we reserve for the next chapter. Before that, we need to consider the careers of the others, so many classic cases of modern imperial expansion, driven by passions for wealth, exploration and national glory, often accompanied by the zeal of Christian missionaries.

The story of the languages is more ambiguous, and hence more interesting, than is often portrayed in the accounts, usually self-congratulatory, of modern European writers. The expansion of the home language in the train of a growing imperial power was by no means assured: we have to account for the curious fact, for example, that the lingua franca of modern Indonesia is a form of Malay, and not Dutch, the language of its overlords for over two centuries; and the linguistic effects of some imperial presences, for example of France in Indochina, of Russia in Muslim Central Asia, or of Japan in Manchuria and Korea, already seem far less durable than those of others. We need to ask what aspects of a conquest have made a linguistic spread apparently permanent, as that of Portuguese in Brazil, of French in the Congo, or of Russian in Siberia. Nebrija’s glib dictum that ‘language was the companion of empire, and followed it in such a way that jointly they began, grew, flourished; and afterwards joint was the fall of both’ is in fact far too simple—in all its claims.

The attitudes to language of these imperial powers, and the degree of their belief in a link between language and culture, tended to be more self-regarding than that of the Spanish Catholic imperialists: that was a feature of their era. Catholic theology had been universal, and in no way a preserve or creation of the Spaniards whose privilege it had been to present it to the Americas. Marauding northern Europeans, by contrast, felt that they did have a particular national gift which accounted for their ability to dominate these previously ‘benighted savages’. But inevitably, since the founders of empires were practical, often hard, men, their appreciation of the role of language too was practical, even superficial. A language would spread first as a kind of lingua franca, perhaps in a quite restricted form, a pidgin, that made all kinds of concessions to the first languages of those who picked it up. A language was seen as a tool for transacting business. European languages were, and often still are, used as second languages in commerce and government, while traditional languages persisted in familiar contexts. As such, the spread of such a language is hard to see as a spread of the linguistic community from which it came.

It makes sense, therefore, to look at the spreads of all these languages as a group, comparatively, rather than to go deeply into the stories of particular languages in particular countries. In this way, we can hope that the crucial features of this global phenomenon, European imperialism, will show through. But by the same token, it is harder to convey the individual flavour of a particular language’s encounter with an alien environment.

The Portuguese were the first European power to project themselves, and their language, across the Atlantic and hence into the world at large. Their long coastline abuts on to little more than the open sea, and it seems to have been their fishing fleets and pirates, rather than merchants, who first took advantage of the great enabling maritime inventions which became available in the fourteenth century, the central rudder fitted to the keel, the magnetic compass, and the portolan chart, which gave pre-calculated directions from point to point. They were able to range widely in the Atlantic, and occasionally to raid infidel ports on the coasts of North Africa. Gradually this became a matter of import to the Portuguese Crown. It conquered the North African enclave of Ceuta in 1415; and it occupied the main uninhabited islands of the eastern Atlantic, Madeira (’wood’, renamed in a Portuguese translation of its previous Spanish name
Legname
) in 1419, the Azores (’goshawks’) in 1427. Thereafter, whether in pursuit of gold, fisheries, religious converts, slaves or other goods, the foreign-oriented Prince Henry (
infante Dom Henrique
), known as the Navigator, initiated a stream of exploratory expeditions southward along the African coast, planting settlements as far south as the Geba river (in modern Guinea-Bissau), some 4,000 kilometres (800 leagues) south of Lisbon, by the time he died in 1460.

The language that his soldiers and sailors (and merchants) spoke was the distinctive Romance spoken on the western flank of Iberia, originally one with Galician, which (probably since Roman times) had developed differently from the versions of the centre (Castilian) and the east (Catalan). It was, and is, distinguished by the palatalisation of sibilants (sh [š] and zh [ž], rather than s and z), the voicing of sibilants when they occur between vowels, and by the widespread nasalisation of vowels when they are followed by n and m (the latter two features also characteristic of French). It also reduces vowels when they are unstressed, and even deletes whole syllables.

An example that shows much of what makes Portuguese distinctive is the equivalent of ‘will you give me hot eggs and bread’: spelt
faz favor de darme
ovos quentes e páo
, it is pronounced faž favor de darme, where Castilian would have
me haces el favor de darme huevos calientes y pan
, me aθes el faßor de darme weßos kalientes y pan.

All in all, Portuguese had come to sound very different from its neighbour Castilian, with the strange result that nowadays Portuguese and Brazilians can still by and large follow spoken Spanish, while for most Spaniards and Spanish-speaking Americans Portuguese is quite impenetrable.

Its homeland was a wide band from north to south in the peninsula, including the area now known as Galicia in modern Spain. The whole region had been taken by (Arabic- and Berber-speaking) Moors in 713, but the northern part down to the Douro was retaken by Christians when the Berbers fell out with their Arab masters in the 740s. The rest of the region yielded very gradually over the next four centuries to the military advance of what became the Christian kingdom of León; but a division made by its king in 1128, assigning the provinces around Portucale (modern Porto) to his son-in-law for purposes of defence against a trying new threat, the onslaught of Moorish Al-moravids from Africa, turned out to have very long-lasting consequences. Portugal, from the Minho to the Mondego, went on to establish its autonomy (1143), its dukes becoming kings (1179); but for the next century its expansion (at the expense of the Moors) was southward only. The Galicians and Portuguese, although still speaking essentially the same language, were sundered permanently. The capital was moved south in 1248 from Porto to Lisbon (Roman
Olisippō).
The Portuguese dialects may have taken some influence from the old Lusitanian language, which had been spoken south of the Douro up to Roman times, and Mozarabic, which had evolved up under five hundred years of Moorish rule; but there is little written evidence for local features of the vernacular. Emerging on to the written page in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, Portuguese came to be associated particularly with lyric poetry, used for this purpose even by a king of Castile.

From the beginning of the sixteenth century this language began to be heard all round the coasts of Africa and southern Asia, and for the first time on the shores of Brazil.

There had been a lull in exploration after the death of Henry the Navigator in 1460. But then in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias had ended the long years of Portuguese creep down the African coast, by demonstrating that its southward extent was finite: and who knew what lay beyond that last
Cabo da Boa Esperança
(’Cape of Good Hope’)? There was then another short interlude, from 1488 to 1498, before the next step was taken; but exploration issues were not forgotten. In fact, it was then that Portugal attempted to challenge Castile’s right to the lands newly discovered by Columbus in his first (1492) voyage to the west. The claim was not upheld, but it was ultimately highly beneficial, since when the dispute was resolved by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas (in Portuguese
Tardesilhas
), Portugal was granted all lands east of a meridian line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. This, ultimately, guaranteed its right to Brazil.

But this prospect was dimly appreciated, if at all, at the time. Far more striking, at first blush, was the achievement four years later of Vasco da Gama when he rounded that last cape, and sailed triumphantly, and arrogantly, into the ocean beyond: at long last, he had achieved the highest goal of a century of Portuguese navigation, and found the sea route to India. This achievement turned out to fulfil the most extravagant hopes of the previous century, for besides finding their way to India the Portuguese found that they also had enough strength to secure direct access to its fabulous merchandise, breaking the centuries-old monopoly of Muslim middlemen. And then, incredibly and immediately, another great prize fell into their laps. Acting swiftly to exploit their new Indian opportunity, they happened to take a roundabout course to the southern tip of Africa: the result was the discovery of Brazil, on 22 April 1500. Now they had the basis for an empire in the New World, as well as exclusive access to the most luxurious market of the Old. Fortune was really smiling on Portuguese enterprise.

It continued to smile for most of the rest of the new century. By the end of it, there were profitable Portuguese trading settlements, protected by fortresses and fleets, all along the coast of the Indian Ocean, and at strategic points beyond, in Malaya and the South China Seas. There were seven settlements in east Africa, six on the Gulf of Oman, fifteen on the western coast of India, four in Ceylon, and two on the eastern coast of India. Malacca, Macassar, Ternate, Tidore, Timor and Macao were all Portuguese possessions.

Although they never achieved the full trade monopoly they were seeking, the Indian Ocean for a century or two was almost a Portuguese lake. Like the Phoenicians and Greeks of the first millennium BC, they did not attempt to control the hinterlands.

But unlike those Phoenicians and Greeks, they were interested in something beyond profit and adventure: after military and commercial expansion came a drive for religious conversion, and Catholic dioceses were set up in Mozambique in 1512, Goa in 1534, Cochin in 1558, Malacca in 1558, Macao in 1575, Meliapore (in eastern India) in 1606; there was even an attempt to spread the faith beyond the shelter of secure Portuguese trading posts, in Ethiopia in 1555, in Funay (i.e. Japan) in 1588, and Tonkin (i.e. Vietnam) in 1659. Like their Spanish cousins at that time in the far more vulnerable territories of the New World, the Portuguese were determined to vindicate the Pope’s faith in them, and their own faith in the Christian God.

And besides deliberately attempting to spread the word of God, the Portuguese were inevitably also spreading their own. The linguistic effects of this commerce-led, and faith-reinforced, expansion were complex. But they give a foretaste of the kind of spread that this ship-borne imperialism would engender as different European nations followed in the Portuguese wake.

First of all, Portuguese was the language used in the fortresses and trading units that were set up as permanent agencies, small expatriate communities in port cities and their surrounds. This was not in itself very significant: inevitably, after all, emigrants go on using their own language to their own kind, and pass it on to at least some of their children and servants when they establish themselves in households in their new homes, especially if they are keeping in regular touch with their countrymen—and trade with Europe was the very
raison d’ ětre
for all these Portuguese settlements, actively maintained against mounting competition until the middle of the seventeenth century. (This
carreira da Índia
averaged five ships a year from 1550 to the 1630s.
¹
) The early shock value of their arrival and the attendant prestige may even have encouraged others for a time to associate with them, and learn from them; in the same way, Christianity proved most attractive in the first couple of generations after it was first preached in Asia, but its growth fell away once it became as well known as the Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim institutions it was bidding to replace.