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

From this native basis, however, Portuguese spread as a tool of trade and international communication, i.e. as a lingua franca. When Portuguese settlements were so widespread in the accessible spots of the coasts of Africa and Asia, it was inevitable that their business partners and other associates would begin to find that the language they had acquired to facilitate relations with the Portuguese had an extra utility in dealing with others of their partners and associates—who might indeed have no other language in common. In fact, this utility of Portuguese outlived its trading dominance by at least a hundred years, lasting until the eighteenth century, when a Frenchman opined: ‘Merchants of the Hindus, Moors, Arabs, Persians, Parsees, Jews and Armenians who do business with the European factories, as well as black men who wish to work as interpreters, are obliged to speak this language; it serves also as a medium of communication among the European nations settled in India.’ [580]

In 1551 the Englishman Thomas Wyndham, visiting the Gold Coast with a Portuguese companion, Antonio Pinteado, found that they could converse in Portuguese with the king of Benin, who had known it since his childhood. [581]In 1600, when Japan received its first ever English visitor, the pilot Will Adams, he was able to communicate only when his surprised host, the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu, managed to find a Portuguese-speaking interpreter. [582]In 1606 Brother Gaspar de San Bernardino, forced by lack of water to land in Persia, was amazed to be addressed by the local military commander: ‘ Padre, quem te trouxe a esta terra tam longe da Índia?’ [118]In 1638, another traveller wrote: ‘Rare are the visitors to Gomron,t though they be for the most part Persians, Arabs and Indians, who do not speak or understand Portuguese, from the trade that they had in earlier years with the Portuguese, who long held the city of Hormuz.’ [583]A little later, in the mid-seventeenth century, kings of Ceylon, and of Arakan on the other side of the Bay of Bengal (northern Burma), insisted on using Portuguese to correspond with the Dutch—even though the emperor of Kandy, Rajasinha II, was in fact in alliance with them against the Portuguese. [119]

Portuguese soon transformed itself from a lingua franca of use to princes and elite travellers to a more generally understood language of the servant class and (often the same people) early converts to Christianity. In the early days, a few phrases in Portuguese might be all that converts gained. Fernáo Mendes Pinto, on a visit to a city in southern China that he calls Sampitay in the late sixteenth century, encountered a woman dressed in red satin, who inveighed passionately against the evils of long sea voyages, and then pulled up a sleeve to reveal a cross elegantly branded on her arm.

… she gave a cry and lifting her hands to Heaven, said loudly: Padre Nosso que estás nos Céus, santificado seja o teu nome… [i.e. the Lord’s Prayer in Portuguese]

This she said in Portuguese. And then returning to speaking in Chinese, as she knew no more Portuguese than these words, she badgered us to tell her if we were Christians …

She went on to reveal that she had inherited the faith from her father, who had practised it for twenty-seven years, making over three hundred converts, and that every Sunday they gathered for worship at her house. [584]

The Dutch, the principal successor power in the region, accepted the linguistic status quo; after 1692 they required arriving chaplains in Madras to learn Portuguese within a year of their arrival as well as the local language of their residence (usually Tamil) ‘in order that they may be able to instruct in Protestant religion the Pagans who are servants or slaves of the Company or its agents’. [585]In 1704 the Dutch governor of Ceylon (now Śri Lanka), Cornelius Jan Simonsz, noted that someone speaking Portuguese could be understood anywhere on that island; and in 1807 the Reverend James Cordiner, in his A description of Ceylon , wrote that ‘A corruption of their original language is still spoken over all the sea coasts. It is very easily learned, and proves of great utility to a traveller who has not time to study the more difficult dialects of the natives.’ [120]

Ironically, one of the strongest citadels of Portuguese was the Dutch power’s own capital in Batavia on the island of Java. To preach the gospel, wrote Jean Brun in 1675, ‘they will acquire Portuguese Bibles and various devotional books in Portuguese and Indian languages and recite the catechism in these languages, because they are understood by most of the Indians… ‘ [586]In 1708 there was even an appeal by Protestant priests there to the governor-general to maintain exclusive use of Portuguese in some churches, claiming:

The Portuguese language is in everyday and familiar use by the slaves of families who come from Ceylon and the [Coromandel] Coast; by all the masters of slaves and by their children in daily dealings with the slaves and Christian natives; by the persons who come from Siam, Malacca, Bengal, Coromandel Coast, the Isle of Ceylon, the Malabar Coast, Surat and even from Persia; and the leading pagans who inhabit this city and do business with the Christians or their slaves learn to speak Portuguese. [587]

But the language was changed by its expansion: it was widely pidginised, and while some Portuguese can still be heard over most of this area to this day, outside Portugal’s most substantial long-term colonies (Angola and Mozambique in Africa, Goa in India) it is in the form of creoles heavily influenced by its local competitor languages. In Indo-Portuguese creoles, for example, still spoken in scattered communities along the Malabar coast of the subcontinent from Daman and Diu in Gujarat to Śri Lanka in the south, the diphthong spelt ei , absent in Indian languages, is reduced to a high [ē] vowel, very different from modern Portuguese, where it is pronounced more like [ai]. [121]The complex inflexions of the language inherited from Latin have been replaced by less involved structures: in Diu, ‘dog’ may still be cáo and ‘son’ filho , but in the plural, instead of cáes and filhos , we have cáo-cáo and fi-fi; verbal tenses are likewise analytic, eu tá vai , T am going’, eu já comeu , ‘I ate’, eu had vai , ‘I shall go’, instead of the standard (and irregular) vou, comi, irei. In Śri Lanka, they have even absorbed the local (Sinhala and Tamil) use of postpositions: eu já vi terra por , ‘I came by land’. [588]Similar, transformed, varieties of Portuguese are still spoken in Malacca in Malaysia (where the language is known as Kristang, betraying its old religious overtones, from Portuguese cristá , ‘Christian’), in Macao in southern China, and in Timor, on the southernmost edge of the East Indies.

The third, and now most significant, type of spread of Portuguese occurred when it was taken up, essentially unchanged, by a new population. This has happened, but only to a tiny extent, in the African colonies of Angola and Mozambique (where recent estimates [589]put the native-speaking ‘Lusophone’ populations at 57,600 and above 30,000—respectively 0.5 per cent and 0.2 per cent of their populations, even if the same source claims that 27 per cent of Mozambicans know Portuguese as a second language). There is also a small remnant of Portuguese in Goa. [122]But it has happened triumphantly in what was Portugal’s largest colony, Brazil: the population is now 166 million, and 95 per cent of them, 158 million, have Portuguese as their first language. This means that speakers in Brazil now outnumber those in Portugal sixteen to one.