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

The second reason is often found in alliance with a third, which can be called the unity reason. A colonial power inevitably imposes a single language on a domain, which ends up being essential to maintaining it as a coherent unit. When the power changes, the language may change too (as for example it did when Spanish replaced both Nahuatl and Quechua in different dominions of the Spanish empire). But quite likely it does not, especially where there is no new conqueror but simply the culmination of a struggle for independence. In that case, the colonial language may linger on: this is another reason for the persistence of French in so many countries of sub-Saharan Africa: it just would not be practicable to administer Cameroon in any one of its 270-plus indigenous languages. And this is, perversely, why Malay was taken up as the unifying ‘Bahasa Indonesia’—by the Dutch just as much as the Indonesian government that followed them.

There is a fourth reason, the globality reason. A country may persist with an imperial language, not because it gives a link to the old colonial power, but because it provides a means to transcend it. This is very widely true of countries that maintain or adopt English in the current era; but it is just as truly the motive for the Russian elite’s adoption of French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The apparent failure of the Russian language to survive strongly where its speakers’ empire is no more can be viewed more clearly in the light of these four reasons.

The creole reason applies only in Siberia, since by and large it is only here that the Russian imperialists settled in large enough numbers to overwhelm the indigenous people. They are approaching this sort of concentration in Estonia and Latvia, and less so in Kazakhstan: but the power there—and hence the linguistic future—has ultimately remained with the previous inhabitants.

The need to retain nostalgic links with the Russians is not widespread in the old Soviet realms; sadly, their old subjects seem to remember little with affection from the long centuries of Russian power. But there is one exception: Belarus, whose government is actively seeking betterment through closer links with Russia, and whose enthusiasm for Russian is correspondingly strong.

By and large, the different republics can achieve substantial unity, each on its own territory, through use of its own language; there is no unity reason to persist with Russian, except in Russia itself, whose Siberian territories are by far the most multilingual in the old empire. And as we have seen, the tiny language communities there are too weak to put up substantial resistance to the unifying grip of organisation in Russian.

Finally, as to globality: sadly too for Russian, in the current age of world communications, it is very evident that the most profitable links are not to be had with the doyens of Russian culture; other lands appear to be freer, more stylish, more powerful and, above all, richer.

Ironically, though, it may be on just this ground that Russian may one day stage a comeback. As the nineteenth century showed, the Russian intelligentsia is capable of remarkable flights of human imagination; and as the twentieth century showed, their scientists, when given respectable financial support—even under tight, and blinkered, state control—are the equal of any in the world. Given a stable and more liberal government than it has hitherto known, Russian culture may yet grow into a form that will make Russia’s former colonies glad to cultivate it, and its language.

Our quick review of the linguistic careers of most of the European imperial powers has revealed a bewildering variety of ways in which empire can be won, exercised and lost, with and without long-term transmission of the imperialist’s language. The serious spread of Spain’s language began some two centuries after it established its empire. The Portuguese language seemed to spread round the Indian Ocean almost independently of its speakers’ progress; and ultimately, it grew strongest in Brazil, where the Portuguese had least scope for their great talent, commerce. The Dutch language, by contrast, hardly spread at all, though the Dutch themselves were far more effective, and more permanent, than the Portuguese as imperialists. French overseas conquests tended to vanish almost as quickly as they were built up; but sometimes French survived there, even under new overlords, and there was a pronounced tendency for those once exposed to the French language to want to keep in touch with it after they had expelled the conquerors. In another contrast, over five hundred years Russian spread itself in every direction from its central plain of north-east Europe, essentially until it encountered any power strong enough to resist it. Until 1992, its spread seemed irreversible. And yet, in the last decade, it has shown how few friends it made in all those centuries of stable advance.

But there is one simplistic prejudice that does seem to hold up: any foreign empire does tend to spread some language. It may not be a local language, not that of the dominant power, as Malay came to dominate the Dutch Indies; and it may not persist long after the departure of foreign control, as Russian is slipping away from Russia’s ex-colonies. But a common language is a practical necessity in a territory brought under common, external, control, and this necessity tends to foster language spread if the domination persists over time, with recruitment of local people to represent, and interface with, the foreign power in later generations.

In this sense, Nebrija was right.

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

With stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain

Friedrich von Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans , 1801, iii.6

One major European language has been largely neglected in our pages, despite its major cultural status, and the sterling attempts to spread it round the world in the nineteenth century. This is German, none other than the language of Martin Luther, which led off the Reformation through a revolution in the printed word. (See Chapter 9, p. 326.) There is something almost accident-prone about German as a potential global language, many times disappointed.

In the opening years of the fifth century (see Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 304) its speakers overran the whole western Roman empire, from Britain to North Africa, permanently installing their leaders as hereditary monarchs in every country they took. Yet the only linguistic gain made was in England. Otherwise German remained largely restricted to its original territory in northern Europe, and in this early period even lost ground to Slavonic in the eastern parts down into the Balkans. (See Chapter 7, ‘Slavonic dawn in the Balkans’, p. 309.) [170]But in the tenth, and again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were large migrations of Germans eastward across the Elbe up to and beyond the modern Polish border on the Oder, turning them into predominantly German-speaking regions. German also spread into many cities in south-eastern Europe, on the lips of merchants and Jews.

Meanwhile, farther north, something much more structured and warlike was afoot. In 1226, the Teutonic knights, called in to fight the heathen, were gifted East Prussia by the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich II. They made good their ownership with the sword and the plough, and were only stopped from pressing on into Russia by the famed Aleksandr N yevskiy in 1242. [171]From 1280 to 1410, their followers founded 1400 villages and ninety-three towns along the Baltic shores, [644]and the German language was established from Prussia to Estonia. The German landowners succeeded in retaining their elite status for five centuries, through vicissitudes of Swedish and Russian overlordship, until the turmoil of 1917.