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

By 1783, less than two centuries after the first English colony at Roanoke, English was the official language of every settlement in the east of North America. At that point, three-quarters of what is now the continental USA (’the lower 48’) was still under the nominal control of foreign powers, France, Spain and—north-west in the Oregon territory—Great Britain. But in the lapse of two generations, by 1853, the whole area was taken by the USA. [197]Furthermore, by 1890 settlers had set up cities and farms in every part of the area. North of the Rio Grande and Gila rivers there was nowhere left for a significant, independent, language community to flourish.

It had all happened so easily, in just a few major constitutional gulps. President Thomas Jefferson took advantage of the brief supremacy of Napoleon in France to purchase the remaining extent of the French Americas, la Louisiane , in 1803; this alone doubled the area of the USA. The next two presidents, James Madison and James Monroe, annexed Florida from Spain, ratifying the deed in 1821; it turned out to be harder to detach Seminole Indians than the Spanish, and the wars with them, begun in 1817, lasted until 1842. Most of the rest of the country was taken during the administration of a single president, James Knox Polk. In 1845 he accepted the accession of Texas, which had detached itself from Mexico—itself newly independent of Spain. In 1846 he split the difference with Britain to end a long wrangle over ownership of the Oregon country, and so created the present western border between the USA and Canada at the 49th parallel. The annexation of Texas, and imposition of war reparations, led to war with Mexico: the USA promptly won it, taking Mexico City in the process, but in 1848 declared itself content to absorb California and the rest of the west. [675]It might have held out for the whole of the rest of Mexico, but eventually decided it was too heavily populated with foreigners. As Senator John J. Calhoun opined—in amazing defiance of two centuries of American history: ‘To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of … incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours … is the Government of a white race.’ [676]

All the lands that had been gained in this rapid onset had of course long been populated, though hardly at all by the European powers from whom they were acquired. The people who had been there—some two hundred separate language communities in English-language America, and over fifty in California alone—found that contact with the settlers followed a fairly predictable course. In the first instance, before they even appeared, mysterious and deadly diseases would beset the tribe. Then, when the white man came to meet them in person, there would be an attempt at conciliation, which might lead to a treaty as between independent nations, the United States (or His Majesty’s) Government and the tribe, which would designate boundaries, and mutual obligations. There might be as much as a generation of peaceful coexistence; but later, as more and more white people arrived, and began to encroach on tribal land, the tribes would find that the white men’s willingness to enforce the agreement against their own people was highly limited; the tribes would find their territories violated, and their livelihoods destroyed. This might mean war, but ultimately the tribes would always lose it. There were just too many whites, and they were far better armed. All too often, the final stage was a unilateral action by the white men to confine or deport the tribes to a reservation, which might be thousands of miles away. This was the English way with the natives of America, and it was repeated over and over again.

It was essentially an exercise in distancing and exclusion. Although US law recognised the tribes as distinct nations, there was no plan to accommodate them or to integrate them as such within the constitution of the republic. Rather, if there was a plan, it was for their members, individually or as families, to become citizens and householders of the republic. Thomas L. McKenney, in charge of Indian affairs from 1816, claimed: ‘We want to make citizens out of them’; and part of the process lay in changing their language to English, ‘the lever by which they are to elevate themselves into intellectual and moral distinction’. [677]On 3 March 1819 the US Congress passed an act to give education to provide ‘against further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes… to instruct them in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation, and for teaching their children in reading, writing and arithmetic’. Expenditure increased from $10,000 in 1819 to $214,000 in 1842, when there were thirty-seven schools and eighty-five teachers. Rule 41 of the Reservation Boarding Schools (1881) read: ‘All instruction must be in the English language. Pupils must be compelled to speak with each other in English, and should be properly rebuked or punished for persistent violation of this rule. Every effort should be made to encourage them to abandon their tribal language.’ [678]

The official intent to eliminate the ancestral peoples of North America as separate entities has not, ultimately, been fulfilled. Indeed, the population pendulum is at last swinging back. In 1999 the indigenous population of the USA (American Indian, Eskimo and Aleut) was estimated as 2.4 million, up from 1.4 million in 1980. As a percentage of the total population, this represents a recovery from 0.6 per cent to just under 1 per cent. [679]But viewed as a means for spreading English, the official policies must be seen as having been effective, and far harder to reverse than a sheer loss of numbers. By now, passive knowledge of English is almost universal. Furthermore, census figures show that by 1990 fewer than a quarter of American Indians were speaking any language but English at home. Even where native language use was holding up best, on the Navajo reservation in the south-west, the number of those among the school-age population speaking only English went up, in this same period of growing Indian numbers, from 11.8 per cent in 1980 to 28.4 per cent in 1990. [680]Now it is reported that fewer than half of Navajo children still speak the language. [681]In the present situation, the prospect for long-term survival of any of North America’s own languages, even in coexistence with English, seems very bleak.

Ask these Pilgrims what they can expect when they git to Kentuckey the Answer is Land, have you any. No, but I expect I can git it. have you anything to pay for land, No. Did you Ever see the Country. No but Every Body says its good land …

Moses Austin. 1796 [682]

’Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything,’ he shouted, his thick, short arms making wide gestures of indignation, ‘for ‘tis the only thing in this world that lasts, and don’t you be forgetting it! ‘Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for—worth dying for.’

’Oh, Pa,’ she said disgustedly, ‘you talk like an Irishman!’

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind , 1936

At this point, with English having completed its spread across North America, it is worth pausing a moment to contemplate this awesome development. By 1890, English had become the presumed common language over 9,303,000 square kilometres of territory, thirty times the area of the British Isles. It was far more than a convenient lingua franca or trade jargon, since for most speakers it was their first language; and for the rest, it was rapidly coming to replace any other language they knew, whether in indigenous tribes or among recently arrived parties of immigrants. Within a single century, a linguistic monoculture had grown to overwhelm a sparsely scattered cornucopia of over two hundred different languages. The only expansion comparable to this in its suddenness and its radical penetration is the Muslims’ spread of Arabic across the Middle East and North Africa. Others that come to mind—the spread of Greek across the Persian empire by Alexander, or that of French across north and central Africa in the nineteenth century—were as sudden, but far less penetrating; and the deep-set and permanent advance of Latin through western Europe, or of Chinese across the plains and mountains of eastern Asia, took many centuries to bring about. How was this first explosion of the English speech community possible?