Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

In some places, the Spanish spread the lenguas generales beyond the range of the pre-Columbian empires that had created them. Under the Spanish, and with the aid of their Nahuatl-speaking allies, notably from Tlaxcallan, who were only too happy to dispossess the Aztecs, Nahuatl spread down into Guatemala, which had hitherto been a preserve of Mayan speakers. This is why so many Guatemalan place names are actually of Nahuatl origin: the name of the beautiful Lake Atitlán means ‘round the water’, or as they put it in the local Tz’utujil, chi-nim-ya ’, ‘by the great water’; Guatemala itself is Quauh-temal-lan , ‘tree-infection-place’, translating the Mayan expression k’i-chee’ (still used to refer to the largest language group in the country, traditionally spelt Quiche). A common ending for town names, -tenango, is from… tenan-co , ’ in the citadel of … ’ : Quetzaltenango, ’ in the citadel of the quetzal bird’, Huehuetenango, ‘in the old citadel’, Momostenango, ‘in the citadel of the chapel’, Chichicastenango, ‘in the citadel of the bitter nettle’. These all have a decidedly foreign ring today, when Nahuatl is no longer spoken east or south of the isthmus of Tepehuantepec, 500 kilometres away. The Tlaxcalans also took their Nahuatl northward, at least to Zacatecas; and in the west, Nahuatl was used by missionaries to preach to the Tarascans of Michoacán (Nahuatl Michuahkan ‘place of those who have fish’), which had never been part of the Aztec domains. [562]

In Peru, the evidence suggests that Quechua had already been spread, whether through the fifteenth-century conquests of Tupac Yupanqui or the travels of Chincha merchants, as far north as the borders of modern Colombia well before the Spanish conquest. [563]The Incas had also established some level of economic link with the Tucumán area to their south: there were roads, garrison stations and inns, and perhaps periodic labour corvées ( mit’ a ) of the type familiar in their empire. But the linguistic impact of this is unclear. At any rate, under Spanish tutelage the language was to consolidate its spread southward. There was net migration from Peru south into the Potosí area of modern Bolivia, to support the vast development of silver mining there. Later, Quechua also spread into the provinces of Tucumán, Santiago del Estero and Córdoba of modern Argentina. In all this area, Spanish inroads were accompanied by larger numbers of attendant Peruvians and mestizos; and so the linguistic advance of empire tended to be Quechua rather than Spanish. Missionary activity too was a factor, after the Council of Lima in 1582-3, which had set out a general plan for the conversion of the Americas: as everywhere, the friars found it more expeditious to preach in the lengua general , and in this period Quechua must still have had some flavour of Inca prestige attached to it. [113]By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tucumán had lost its previous languages, and was essentially a Quechua-speaking region. [564]

The ministers of the church who do not attempt to advance and extend the Castilian language and take care that the Indians know how to read and write in it, leaving them shut up in their own language, are to my thinking the declared enemies of the natives, of their policy and rationality…

Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitrón, archbishop of Mexico, 1769 [565]

In the middle of the eighteenth century, when Spain had dominated the Americas for fully ten generations, many Spaniards were disappointed in the very much less than universal spread of their language. Rosenblat estimates that in the Spanish colonies in 1810 there were three mother-tongue speakers of an indigenous language for every one who had grown up with Spanish: 9 million rural Indians to 3 million whites, creoles and mestizos. [566]The archbishop of Mexico, Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitrón—himself a Spaniard, naturally—took the language question particularly to heart:

This is a constant truth: the maintenance of the language of the Indians is a folly [ un capricho ] of men, whose fortune and learning is restricted to speaking that tongue learnt even as a child: it is a contagion, which separates the Indians from the conversation of the Spaniards; it is a plague, which infects the Dogmas of our Holy Faith; it is a prejudicial marker to separate the natives of some villages from others by diversity of their tongues; it is an increased cost for the parishes, which require ministers of different languages in their same domain; and it is an impossibility for the governance of the bishops. [567]

In 1769, in a pastoral letter to the archdiocese of Mexico, he proposed the abolition of all indigenous languages through the compulsory use of Spanish. He was a child of his time, the era of the Enlightenment, when the universal benefits to humanity of Reason were being ever more widely appreciated, and new, radical, policies were being proposed to give them effect. Almost as important, he had the ear of the king of Spain, Carlos III. As a result, even though his proposal was rejected by the then viceroy of Mexico, who felt that all that was needed was better enforcement of the existing (two-hundred-year-old) standards for teaching Spanish, and then by the full Council of the Indies, on the even more traditional grounds that the Council of Trent (1545) clearly required the teaching of the gospel in natives’ languages, the king nevertheless ordered and signed the fatal royal Cédula of 16 April 1770, whose crucial phrase runs: ‘in order that at once may be achieved the extinction of the different languages used in the said domains, and the sole use of Castilian …’

The decree noted that previous royal commandments for schools in Castilian to be established in all villages had been to little avail. But in fact its only concrete requirement was for bishops to appoint curates henceforth without any concern for their competence in languages other than Spanish. This was directed not just to Mexico, but explicitly to every part of the Spanish empire, including the Philippines.

The decree was followed up in 1782 by a second, which required civil and religious authorities to provide for the funding of masters in Castilian. This did not lead to any wide-scale improvement in the teaching of Spanish in the empire. The gains for Spanish, though real, came about by default, almost as the first royal Cédula had imagined: Indians’ use of their own languages was simply wished away, as the Spanish authorities increasingly addressed them in Spanish, willy-nilly. All official support for education in the indigenous languages came to be withdrawn; professorial chairs in the universities were discontinued; books written in them ceased to be published. Courts in Mexico ceased to entertain pleas written in Nahuatl. Furthermore, the same period was seeing a decline in the influence and the power of the Church within the empire, a process generally attributed to the spread of the Enlightenment in Europe, but evidenced most dramatically in the expulsion of the Jesuits from all their reducciones in South America in 1767. [114]The Indians were losing not only the institutional supports for their languages, but also their European protectors, the friars and priests. These trends turned out to be sufficient to bring on the decline of all the lenguas generales.

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.