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

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’. [568]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 … ‘ [569]

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’. [570]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, [571]by 1995 there were 95.8 million, with fully 88 per cent of them first-language speakers of that language. [572]

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. [573]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. [574]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. [575]

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. [576]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). [577]

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; [578]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’. [115]