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

The result was a massive, and subsequently sustained, increase in Brazil’s Portuguese-speaking population, both from immigration (including import of slaves), and from natural growth. This had comprised less than 150,000 around 1650; by 1770 they comprised over 1,500,000; and this in a period when the rest of the Americas (Spanish- and English-speaking alike) had just about doubled their numbers. In the same period, Brazil had come to provide the second and third most populous Portuguese-speaking cities in the world, Baía (Salvador) and Rio de Janeiro yielding only to Lisbon. This influx of rich and prolific immigrants from Europe, which reinforced the influx of uprooted slaves from Africa, crowded out the previous língua geral of the interior, Tupinambá, to say nothing of the tiny languages spoken by individual tribes. It was estimated in 1985 that there were no more than 155,000 Brazilians who spoke indigenous languages, approximately one for every thousand speakers of Portuguese. [593]

Ultimately, then, the growth of Portuguese to its present status (176 million native speakers, ranking seventh in the world, ahead of German, French and Japanese) owes almost everything to the economic development, and consequent population growth, of Brazil over the past three hundred years, and very little to its spread from Portugal as a language for colonial administration, or as a lingua franca in Asia, both of which peaked over four hundred years ago.

Saïdjah kwam te Batavia aan. Hy verzocht een heer hem in deenst te nemen, hetgeen die heer terstond deed omdat hy Saïdjah niet verstond. Want te Batavia heeft men gaarne bedienden die nog geen maleisch spreken en dus nog niet zo bedorven zyn als anderen die langer in aanraaking waren met europese beschaving. Saïdjah leerde spoedig maleisch, maar paste braaf op…

Saïdjah came to Batavia. He asked a gentleman to take him into service, which the gentleman at once did, because he did not understand Saïdjah[’s language]. For in Batavia people liked servants who did not yet speak Malay and so were not so spoiled as the others who had been longer in contact with European civilization. Saïdjah learnt Malay quickly, but behaved well…

Multatuli, Max Havelaar (Amsterdam, 1860), ch. 17

Pelabur habis Palembang tak alah

Rations finished, Palembang not beaten

Malay proverb [124]

After a century of stability, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth, the Portuguese trading empire in Asia was lost almost as rapidly as it was built up. This was overwhelmingly due to the efforts of another small European power, the Dutch. [125]The Dutch speedily divested Portugal of the sources of its Asian incomes, and became a fixture in the East Indies for three centuries. But in our history of world languages, they have only a negative part to play. The Dutch career demonstrates that a successful European imperial power may yet leave little or no linguistic trace in its domains—further evidence, in fact, that Nebrija was wrong.

The Dutch imperial career began against the odds, almost as a commercial sideline in their war of independence from Spain, a struggle that was to last intermittently from 1568 to 1648, but which in fact, from 1588, allowed the burghers of the new republic of the United Provinces considerable freedom of action. Despite the uncertain times, the supply of luxury goods to northern Europe (mostly from Asia, and often by re-export from Portugal) had become proverbially ‘rich trades’ for Dutch merchants in the 1590s. Then in 1598 Dutch ships, goods and merchants were embargoed from all ports in the Spanish/Portuguese empire. Minds were duly concentrated, and the immediate result was an explosion of East India trading enterprise—by 1601 fourteen Dutch fleets, with sixty-five vessels, had set sail on behalf of eight different companies. [594]Such a splurge of competition could only be adverse both at source in the Indies and in the customer markets of Europe, and so in 1602, with the collusion of all the companies involved, the United East India Company ( Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie —VOC) was founded as a state monopoly of such trade. Somewhat later, in 1624, a similar organisation, the West India Company ( Westindische Compagnie– -WIC) was established to control Dutch interests in the western hemisphere.

Of the two companies, WIC had far less long-term success as a procurer of Dutch real estate and colonial populations. It began well; from 1623 a tract of North America (covering most of what is now New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, and the southern half of New York State) was taken as ‘Nieuw Nederland’, and outright conquests from Portugal followed, of the Guinea coast in 1637-42, of northern Brazil (as ‘Nieuw Holland’) in 1631, of Angola in 1641, as well as the acquisition of less crucial holdings in the Antilles and Guyanas. Around 1640, WIC was in control of the Atlantic markets in sugar, slavery and furs. But by 1665 all but the Antilles and Guyanas had been lost. Besides the recaptures by Portugal, Nieuw Nederland was taken forcibly by England (and New Amsterdam became New York) in 1664. WIC retrenched to being a simple trading company, making a good living where previously it had aspired to rule. There was still plenty of gold in Guinea, and a demand for African slaves in the Netherlands. Dutch remained, in the small colonies, as a language of administration. Nowadays there are a bare thousand native speakers of Dutch in the republic of Suriname (Dutch Guiana), while perhaps a quarter of the half-million population use it as a second language. The Antilles remain for the most part dependent on the Netherlands, but fewer than 10 per cent of the 185,000 people have Dutch as a first language.

The VOC, on the other hand, went on to real colonial greatness. In the East Indies, the source of the spice trade, they displaced the Portuguese permanently from Ambon, and later Ternate and Tidore, in the Moluccas (1605-62), Malacca in Malaya (1641), and Macassar (modern Ujung Pandang) in Sulawesi (1667). They also went beyond the scope of Portugal’s holdings by seizing Jakarta in western Java (1619) as their centre of operations (comparable to Goa for the Portuguese), and renaming it Batavia. [126]Through intrigue rather than war, they displaced the Portuguese as monopolists in the Japan trade (1639), with a permanent base in Nagasaki. [127]In the Indian subcontinent, they established an early foothold at Pulicat (1613), and between 1638 and 1661 they took from the Portuguese Ceylon and their whole string of southern Indian possessions from Kannur round to Negapatam. In Africa, they were unable for long to dislodge the Portuguese from Angola or Mozambique, but went on to found their own South African colony in between at Cape Town ( Kaapstad ) in 1652. Willem Bosman remarked in 1704 that the Portuguese had been ‘as setting-dogs to spring the game, which as soon as they had done, was seized by others’. [595]

Curiously but significantly, it was only in Africa that their colonial intrusiveness bore any linguistic fruit. It was here that Dutch settlers were attracted, just as Brazil, in the end, attracted settlers from Portugal. The Dutch settlers were not merchants, nor miners, but farmers (i.e., in Dutch, Boer). Their language, a mildly simplified version of Dutch that came to be known as Afrikaans (’African’), developed and grew with their population, even after the British had gained control of the country. [128]Subsequently, in 1836, tiring of British rule, they spread out on the Great Trek, into the east of what is now South Africa, to found the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Their influence was reduced temporarily after their defeat by the British in the Boer War of 1899-1902. But numbers prevailed in the white community—as they were later to do as between black and white—and in the following half-century Afrikaans came to be explicitly the language of the South African ruling majority. Afrikaans in 1991 had 6.2 million speakers in South Africa, centred in Pretoria and Bloemfontein, a million of them native bilinguals with English. Another 4 million there were using it as a second or third language. Taking all of them together, the 10 million who know the language compare significantly with the 20 million or so who now speak Dutch worldwide (13.4 million in the Netherlands, another 5 million in Belgium). [596]