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

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. [116]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.

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.

Sustentava contra ele Vénus bela ,

Afeiçoada à gente Lusitana ,

Por quantas qualidades via nela

Da antiga táo amada sua Romana;

Nos fortes corações, na grande estrela ,

Que mostraram na terra Tingitana ,

E na língua, na qual quando imagina ,

Com pouca corrupçáo crě que é a Latina.

Against him spoke up Venus fair

With affection for the race of Portugal

For all the qualities she saw in it

From Rome, that she so loved of old;

In their brave hearts, in the great star,

Which they showed in the land of Ceuta [their first conquest],

And in their tongue, which her imagination

Could take for a somewhat corrupted Latin.

Camões, [117] Os Lusíadas , i.33

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.