Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (97 page)

At this point, with English having completed its spread across North America, it is worth pausing a moment to contemplate this awesome development. By 1890, English had become the presumed common language over 9,303,000 square kilometres of territory, thirty times the area of the British Isles. It was far more than a convenient lingua franca or trade jargon, since for most speakers it was their first language; and for the rest, it was rapidly coming to replace any other language they knew, whether in indigenous tribes or among recently arrived parties of immigrants. Within a single century, a linguistic monoculture had grown to overwhelm a sparsely scattered cornucopia of over two hundred different languages. The only expansion comparable to this in its suddenness and its radical penetration is the Muslims’ spread of Arabic across the Middle East and North Africa. Others that come to mind—the spread of Greek across the Persian empire by Alexander, or that of French across north and central Africa in the nineteenth century—were as sudden, but far less penetrating; and the deep-set and permanent advance of Latin through western Europe, or of Chinese across the plains and mountains of eastern Asia, took many centuries to bring about. How was this first explosion of the English speech community possible?

In order to give a satisfactory answer, the question is best broken into two. How could a single European language take over the whole of North America? And why of all the contenders was it English which expanded, and not other European languages that were already in place?

The first English colonists’ own motives for coming to America were largely the product of delusion. Backers of early voyages of discovery and settlement were courted with prospects of a North-West Passage to enable trade with China and India, of landed estates, and of secure bases to derive wealth from fishing and piracy. The actual returns on capital invested, which came from the fur trade, and from cultivation of crops such as tobacco and indigo, were not foreseen. But from the language point of view, the important thing is not capital, but labour. And after the colonies had become established, there were yet other reasons for people to go out to live there. Most often they were economically desperate, and went under contracts of indentured labour, serving out terms of four or five years before they were free to settle. Others came out to found a new society on ideal principles: such were the famed Pilgrim separatists who came to Massachusetts in 1620, and were followed by so many Puritans in the decades that followed, when the home country was racked by civil war, Commonwealth and Restoration. But what many found, when they arrived, was a string of English settlements where good arable land was available, and as yet largely unfarmed. Crops, when planted, flourished, and there were good markets for the harvests. Gradually, the colonies acquired a reputation for plenty, and emigration began to seem ever more attractive to those facing an uncertain future in Britain. They embarked for the west, often bringing wives and children with them. Governments were never oppressive in the colonies; but after the war for independence which prevailed in 1783, the new beacon of political liberty could be added to the attractions of ready wealth on offer.

It is this introduction of wide-scale agriculture, from hundreds of thousands of new farms, which accounts for the spread of the white settlers at the expense of the natives. It gave them the wherewithal to raise large families, far bigger than what was needed to replace their strength in the next generation: instead, the surplus would head off farther west. The population of these English colonies quadrupled in the two generations between 1650 and 1700. And so it continued, unrelenting for more than three centuries from 1600: startling fertility coupled with an unceasing flow of new recruits from Europe.

For choice of language, it turned out to be crucial that the immigration for the first half of this period had been predominantly from the British Isles. Some 220,000 had immigrated during the seventeenth century, and perhaps twice as many in the eighteenth. Small numbers, compared with the 40 million who would come in the next two centuries. But the first immigrants’ language influence was decisive: the vast majority of them had come from Britain and Ireland, and spoke English. Not exclusively so: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, already perhaps 8 per cent of the population were of German origin. Nevertheless, in 1794 German-speaking farmers in Augusta County, Virginia, were dismissed when they asked the US House of Representatives for a German translation of the laws. The Speaker of the House at the time, F. A. C. Mühlenberg, happened to be a German himself, but still refused to support the request.
^*

Since 1820, English speakers have in fact been a minority among immigrants, at 43 per cent.
^†
But although immigrants have here and there established communities where many can understand a given foreign language, the USA as a country—perhaps taking its lead from the traditional British stance—has remained resolutely monolingual in English. Despite the vast opportunity to found new towns and cities right up until the end of the nineteenth century as the settlers moved west, English was everywhere accepted as the public language in these new communities as they arose.

Why, then, was it predominantly from Britain that North America was colonised in those first two centuries? Britain, after all, had hardly been the first to establish a foothold on the eastern American shores: Quebec was founded as the capital of Nouvelle-France in 1608 almost simultaneously with Jamestown in Virginia; and Nieuw Nederland had been begun at Fort Nassau up the Hudson river in 1617, three years before the Pilgrims settled in Massachusetts. For seventeen years, 1638-55, even the Swedes had maintained a settlement,
Ny Sverige
, at Delaware Bay, in the area claimed by the Dutch.

What distinguished the British was their desire to settle. From the very beginning, they looked for individual holdings of land, on which they could make a living, and bring up a family. However far they may have travelled, they aspired to do this on much the same terms, and with the same religious beliefs, that they had accepted in their original homes. The resulting large families would then grow up to repeat the cycle. It was the drive and then the proven ability to do this which meant that, after the first couple of generations, when competition arose with other European powers, the British were always present in larger numbers; this translated into winning armies, but it also meant that they soon occupied any territorial gains that they made.

The crunch came with the Dutch after fifty years. In that time, the Dutch West India Company (see Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 395) had gone on from a culture of trading posts for beaver furs, through a supporting infrastructure of farms (
bouwerijen
),
^*
to offering wealthy businessmen quasi-feudal tenancies called
patroon
ships, a system designed to ensure the delivery of colonists in packages of fifty. It was only when this preferential treatment for the wealthy was shelved, and the company began to offer mechanics and farmers free passage for themselves and their families in 1656, with as much land as they were able to cultivate, that settlement took off, from an estimated two thousand in 1648 to ten thousand in 1660. But it was too late. Settlers were slow to follow the company’s urgings to fortify their holdings, and the British neighbours still outnumbered the Dutch four to one.
³⁵
In 1664, when Colonel Nicolls arrived with four men-of-war, as one operation in the then global Anglo-Dutch war, Nieuw Nederland surrendered without a fight. It changed hands once more nine years later, but in 1674 was finally awarded to Britain. In the strictly business negotiations that ended the wars, a North American colony famous chiefly for its beaver pelts counted for less than the sugar cane of Suriname, and the nutmeg of Rūn Island in the East Indies.

The French connection with North America was a decidedly harder nut to crack. French policy had begun quite differently from British, with a strong lead from the king and his court in establishing settlements, yet a decidedly laissez-faire approach to life once there, as long as the furs continued to flow back to France. The result was a marked variance in social profile, with young single males going out alone to Nouvelle-France to become
coureurs de bois
, wild frontiersmen, and settling down—if they ever did—
à la façon du pays
, to found bilingual ménages with local women, producing
métis
children who would hardly consider themselves French at all, and might well not speak the language. This approach made them much more popular with the American Indians, who for the most part sided with them in wars with the Dutch and British. But this turned out not to be the support they needed. The economic focus on the proceeds of hunting—furs—did not make for widespread settlement or domestication of the land, and the reliance on local brides—thereby of course denying issue to as many indigenous men—meant that their population did not increase. The French government attempted to intervene in the process in the 1670s by providing a supply of
filles à marier
, with some success (see Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 414). But even this could not compete with the natural growth of the land-hungry British.

In the event it was the terms of peace after almost a century of global war, the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which were to end direct French involvement in America. But if North America alone had been the battlefield and the prize, it had long been clear who would prevail. There were over twenty Britons for every Frenchman in the continent at the time.
^*
And if proof were needed of the importance of men on the ground, it was provided by the English rebels of the Thirteen Colonies twenty years later, who defeated the British army as the French never could. As a final insult, the infusion of British loyalists into Canada which the war caused, together with subsequent immigration that excluded France, meant that British subjects, and English speakers, quite directly minoritised the French in what had been their own colony.

The final serious obstacle to English-speaking dominance of North America was provided by the first entrant to the colonial competition, the empire of Spain. Although Spain and England had been at royal loggerheads during the sixteenth century, and English pirates had pursued the quarrel unofficially in the Caribbean during the seventeenth, the British and Spanish governments had largely given each other a wide berth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then they had come to blows briefly and inconclusively, and exchanged control of Florida back and forth between 1763 and 1783. The real reckoning was to come between their two successor states, the United States of America and the Republic of Mexico, over Texas.

Once again it was the propensity of English immigrants to settle which led to trouble. Moses Austin, discovering deposits of lead, had acquired from Spain—in 1820, just before it granted independence to Mexico—a permit to bring three hundred American families into this territory, hitherto seen as a very barren area. By 1832 his colonies amounted to about eight thousand souls, and others had brought the Anglo population up to twenty thousand. In 1833 a coup in Mexico city installed Antonio López de Santa Anna, and reversed Mexican policy on Texas: the Anglos’ response was to declare independence and—while staving off Mexican attempts to reclaim the territory—appeal to Uncle Sam. They had to wait out two unsympathetic administrations, but in 1845 President Polk agreed to annexation. Polk got the war he wanted, and was then able to get by force of arms what he had been denied as a purchase, namely the Pacific stretch of Mexico north of the Gila river, including California. In one mighty throw, the USA’s bounds had been extended ‘from sea to shining sea’. Then a new surge of Anglo-Saxon mass settlement sealed the acquisition, though the motive this time was one that the Spanish could very much appreciate: the settlers this time were not farmers but Forty-Niners, prospectors on the track of gold.

The fact that such a vast area—essentially what is now the whole American West—could change hands so lightly demonstrates how superficial the Spanish presence had been in the three centuries of their control. As the French had reached a non-intrusive accommodation with the natives through the fur trade in Canada and Louisiane, so the Spanish, at last planting a string of Catholic missions along the coast from 1769 to 1823, had established only the lightest contact with the Californian subjects of
Su Majestad el Rey.
Nevertheless, agriculture and stock ranches, with a significant export trade in hide, horns and tallow, had briefly flourished under the auspices of the
padres.
In the very last years, after Mexican independence in 1821, there had been a movement for more radical settlement, and from 1834 a flurry of land grants were made to Mexicans who came to be known as
los Californios
, non-clerical settlers who quickly achieved a brutal reputation. But politically, the transition to Anglo control was almost instant.

Linguistically, the situation has turned out to be far more ambivalent. It seems that those
padres
and even
Californios
had quite an influence. Today, one and a half centuries after the appropriation of Florida, Texas and northern Mexico, 20 million US citizens, 7.3 per cent of the population, still consider Spanish to be, not their second, but their
first
language.
³⁶
Since almost all of these will live in one of the nine states
^*
that used to be, at least in part, Spanish territory (total population 83 million), the language situation there is actually one where one person in four is still happiest to speak Spanish. The incoming Anglo settlers, resident for five or six generations, have clearly established English as dominant: but the Spanish-language community is not dying out. Indeed, it is still growing.