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

Likewise, in East Africa the lingua franca is Swahili. This language, of Bantu origin but transformed through trade contact with Arabic (see Chapter 3, ‘Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission”, p. 103), has some 30 million speakers in all, but only 5 million of them acquired it naturally as their first language. Nevertheless, it is the official language of Tanzania, and the most widely spoken language in neighbouring Kenya and many other countries in the area. Everywhere, it has fewer speakers than the countries’ largest languages.

For many purposes, it is less important how many there are in a linguistic community than who those people are—and how well distributed.

The most evident judgement to emerge from our global survey is that migration of peoples, the first force in history to spread languages, dominates to this day. A farmers’ migration brought Chinese south to the banks of the Yangtze Kiang and beyond; nomads’ and refugees’ migrations brought Aramaic east from Syria and down the Euphrates to Babylon; a merchants’ migration brought Punic across the Mediterranean sea from Tyre to Carthage and North Africa. Migrations organised politically as state colonies, but still attracting volunteers, seeded Latin among the Gauls of northern Italy and southern France in the second and first centuries BC, as they seeded English along the eastern shores of North America in the seventeenth AD, and along the shores of Australia in the nineteenth. Even now the quasi-spontaneous migration dynamic of Spanish speakers moving north across the Rio Grande is the greatest challenge to the complete dominance of English in the USA.

It appears that, until the interesting developments with English in India in the nineteenth century, foreign conquests led to language shift only if the conquest was followed up with substantial immigration of people who already spoke the conquerors’ language. In this sense, it is migration rather than conquest which is really at root when a military conqueror apparently spreads his language into new territories.

The importance of attracting immigrants may account for a major difference that we noted between the Greek and Roman empires. Greek-speaking only superficially followed Alexander’s conquests in the far-flung provinces of the Persian empire, even though Greek control was politically secure. In Persia itself, Greek was eliminated after five or six generations when Parthians reasserted indigenous control; and even in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, where Greek administration was taken up under the Romans and so continued for a millennium, the popular language for all that time remained Aramaic (with Egyptian in Egypt). When the Arabs took over administration in the seventh century, Greek was eliminated altogether within a couple of generations, even after a thousand years. By contrast, the Roman conquests on the continent of western Europe have proved permanent in their linguistic effects. Even where there were no explicit colonies (and we have noted how these led the way for Latin in northern Italy—see Chapter 7, ‘Rún: The impulsive pre-eminence of the Celts’, p. 293), all over the empire the Roman army provided a continuing source of settlers, veterans often settling down and working the land where they had served. [734]

Likewise, the cracking early pace of English-speaking immigration into North America was influential in promoting English over all the other colonial languages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (See Chapter 12, ‘Westward Ho!’, p. 481.) And as the exception that proves the rule, Canadian French established itself, and throve, through a deliberate policy of assisted emigration for French-speaking women. (See Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 414.) The later massive immigration to North America was an exception in a different sense: it did not diminish the now settled English-speaking tendency of the continent because immigrants did not, in general, move or settle in with others of the same language; as a result these later immigrants tended mostly to acquire English, rather than passing their own languages on to their new neighbours. Despite many community links, this trend prevailed.

Immigration is the basic seed of language spread, but very often the propensity of newcomers to settle, and so displace older populations with different languages, is compounded and reinforced by the greater fertility of the newcomers. Finding themselves at some sort of advantage over the natives, they turn out to have larger families, and hence in a few generations are more numerous than the indigenous population. This has very likely always been a concomitant of large-scale immigration—without some sort of advantage, whether in health, wealth or even acceptance of lower wages, it is difficult to see how any immigrant population can become established over residents—but it has been particularly clear in the early history of the USA, Australia and New Zealand, where the growth was meteoric and documented by census. In all these cases, the immigrants were introducing temperate-zone crops and livestock. One can conjecture, however, that similar factors must have played out very often in the past—for example, in favour of the first Semitic speakers in many parts of western Asia, when they first introduced arable crops into new territories that had previously known only hunters, gatherers and pastoralists. Larger families mean heightened demand for land, but also larger armies to take and defend it, and all this benefits the languages the farming immigrants speak. This is in fact nothing other than the ‘natural growth’ that we found responsible for so many large language communities in Chapter 13.

One factor that is often credited for language spread we have found of very little long-term effect. This is trade. Formal trade relations are of course of great antiquity, at least as old as written language. (We saw that the origin of written language in Mesopotamia seems to have been due to a reinterpretation of trading tokens (Chapter 3, ‘Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death’, p. 51).) But no community famous for specialisation in trade has passed its language on permanently as a vernacular, or even as a lingua franca, to its customers. At most such activity tends to infiltration of the language, or even diffusion, since the instances where merchants have set up permanently as immigrants into the customer community are rather rare. Carthage, which carried the merchants’ language Phoenician, or Punic, into a substantial part of North Africa would be one such rare example. In general, these merchants’ languages—other examples are Sogdian along the Silk Road, Arabic and later Portuguese in the Indian Ocean—do not make the jump from a restricted business use. When the market disappears, or others muscle in, the language too is dropped. So suggestions that English nowadays is benefiting from its position as the language of global business need to be received with some scepticism: English may well be today’s pragmatic preference, but trade patterns change over time, and a trade connection alone will not guarantee a language community.

However, merchants do not always just bring goods on their visits to exotic locations. Sometimes they bring with them a new faith, and either act as missionaries for it themselves, or bring vocational missionaries with them. These missions can be important vehicles of a new language, if the faith has such an association. The Sanskrit and Pali that reached South-East Asia in the first millennium AD came with Hindu and Buddhist traders or buccaneers; a thousand years later, other traders from India were bringing in Islam, while the first European merchants, mostly Portuguese, were offering them Catholic Christianity. Of these four religions, each with an attendant language, only Christianity—the least language-conscious—seems to have projected its language as a vernacular; while Sanskrit, Pali and Arabic have remained languages confined to worship, Portuguese actually became the first language of many converts, and survives to this day in popular creolised forms from India to Malaya. And the English East India Company, which had come to India merely in search of profit, stayed long enough for missionaries to build up their strength and end up teaching the population English too.