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

How, then, has the language come to be transplanted into Brazil so effectively, but nowhere else? The reasons are, of course, historical, but also political and above all economic. In brief, Brazil was the only one of its colonies where Portugal found both a significant source of wealth which was attractive to immigrants, and no pre-existing power strong enough to resist its domination.

India was certainly a source of wealth, from trade in a vast range of commodities; but the local powers that the Portuguese encountered there effectively resisted any Portuguese break-out from their coastal settlements. In Sri Lanka, known to them as Ceiláo , the Portuguese at one time had effective control, and might well have established themselves, and perhaps their language, in the long term if they had not soon been expelled by the Dutch. Farther east, in the islands of the East Indies, the Portuguese looked for profit from the trade in spices; but the bottom fell out of the market for these commodities too soon. It is in any case arguable—not least from comparing the fate of other European empires in Asia—that the kind of wealth derivable from trade with these countries was never going to attract large numbers of immigrants, and so build a large Portuguese-language community. Trade requires capital, or at least a significant military force to impose terms; as a result, governments and large-scale organisations have an overwhelming advantage. Where trade, rather than production, is the source of wealth, the only way for large numbers of immigrants and small-scale outsiders to take part is if they become pirates.

In Africa, although Portugal had held small settlements all down the western coast since the fifteenth century, principally as staging ports for the carreira da Índia , no serious source of wealth besides the slave trade was ever discovered. They never attracted large numbers of Portuguese-speaking settlers. But this trade contributed mightily, at one remove, to the spread of Portuguese in South America. Of the 10 million African slaves shipped to the Americas between 1526 and 1870, 3.6 million went to Brazil alone, [590]at first to provide labour for sugar plantations, later for cotton and tobacco. As in the other slave economies of the Americas, the Africans could not bring their languages with them. They were in contact with too few of their ex-neighbours to speak those languages, for the slave markets distributed them without regard to origin all over the colonies, and they had perforce to learn the language of their new masters. Often too those very masters would become the fathers of their children; in a very few generations most of the population came to be of mixed blood, but nonetheless speakers just of Portuguese.

White immigration too was more substantial into Brazil than to anywhere else in the Portuguese possessions. Early on, neither Portugal’s court nor its people had taken much interest in their American colony, since it had unaccountably not yielded anything like the copious gold and silver that the Spanish were extracting from their colonies in Mexico and Peru.

But the hostile attentions of other European powers, and the effort needed to repel them, then concentrated Portugal’s sense that here was something worth having. The Spanish had respected the claims in accord with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas—indeed, from 1580 to 1640 Spain and Portugal were united under a single (Spanish) government—but other powers that were not party to it had been more dangerous. The French had posed the first challenge in 1555, with raids and attempted settlements that persisted until 1615, then the English (less seriously) from 1582 to 1595. Most aggressive were the Dutch. After some early inconsequential attacks in 1598-9, from the 1620s until 1641 they succeeded in taking possession of the whole of the Brazilian north-east from Sáo Luis to Aracaju, and holding it until 1654. In 1624 they had even briefly taken the very heart of the Portuguese colony, its first capital at Baía (also called Salvador). The Portuguese seem to have found the determination, and hence the resources, to retake them only when they resigned themselves finally to the loss of most of their colonies in India and beyond. (Indeed, as we shall soon see, those became the next target of the Dutch.)

A series of resolute expeditions had mapped out most of the interior by the mid-seventeenth century. Known as bandeiras , ‘flags’, they were inspired by the (mostly unavailing) quest for gold, silver, jewels or natives to capture as slaves. Their main success had lain in pre-emptively defining borders with Spain’s colonies that were being rather less actively explored from the opposite side of the continent. (The borders were actually agreed a hundred years later in the Treaties of Madrid, 1750, Pardo, 1761 and Ildefonso, 1777, which finally erased the notional Line of Tordesillas.)

Despite these explorations, until the second half of the seventeenth century the only Portuguese to settle more than 400 kilometres from the coast had been the missionaries, especially the Jesuits. And as in the Spanish colonies, they had found it easier to preach in a language other than their own. Most of the local languages they called línguas travadas , ‘hobbled tongues’, so there was evidently little enthusiasm for them. In a celebrated sermon preached to a departing mission in 1657, Father Antonio Vieira said he had heard someone call the Amazon the ’rio Babel’ , for its eighty languages: ‘What must it be to learn Nheengaíba, or Juruna, or Tapajó, or Teremembé, or Mamaianá, whose very names seem to strike terror?… To the Apostles God gave tongues of fire, but to their successors a fire of tongues. The tongues of fire came to an end, but the fire of tongues did not, because this fire, this spirit, this love of God makes one learn, study and know those languages.’ [591]

For all this heady combination of language-learning and the love (or fear) of God, in Brazil it had turned out that Tupinambá (a language very closely related to the Guaraní of Paraguay) could be used everywhere (see Chapter 10, ‘Past struggles: How American languages had spread’, p. 348), and it came to be called the língua geral (the Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish lengua general). In the early days of the colony, it was the main means of communication with the natives. One Jesuit witness wrote, about 1560: ‘Almost all who come to the Kingdom and are settled and in communication with the Indians get to know it within a short time, and the sons and daughters of the Portuguese born here get to know it better than the Portuguese do, mainly in the captaincy of Sao Vicente.’ [592]

Organising the Indians into aldeias (villages) and reduçáes (reserved areas), the Jesuits in fact resisted the inroads of other white settlers. This kind of resistance to a specifically colonial development of the interior was to last until the mid-eighteenth century. One effect was that the use of Portuguese remained confined to the coastal districts for the first two centuries of the colony’s existence. Only in 1759 did the Jesuits lose their power to protect and organise the Indians in this way, when they were stripped of their powers and expelled from the country. [123]For good measure, the further use of the língua geral was banned at the same time.

But Brazil was now to become a more appealing prospect for settlers. After the reassertion of Portuguese power in 1654, a stream of economic developments at last provided a motive for large-scale immigration from Europe, and with it the spread of the Portuguese language. Ore beds with gold, emeralds, diamonds and other precious stones were found in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, principally in the southern central area henceforth called Minas Gerais , ‘General Mines’, but also inland in Baía, Goiás and Mato Grosso. The result was the world’s first gold rush, coming mostly from Portugal, and thereafter an eighteenth-century economy with government revenues founded securely on gold. When the gold ran out towards the end of that century, its place was taken by the export profits from cattle ranching, especially in sales of leather, an industry that had taken advantage of the opening up of massive grasslands in these same south and central areas.