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

But missionaries are not always traders with an ulterior motive. Missions may themselves offer a major motive for travel to distant parts: and such pilgrim missionaries have spread many languages, especially in Asia. In the first century AD Buddhist monks rounded the Himalayas, through Afghanistan and the Pamirs, to take the Four Noble Truths to the Chinese, and with them sacred Sanskrit. In the eighth century Nestorians, coming all the way from Syria via Persia, reached the entrance of the same Silk Road, and through it brought Christianity—and at least briefly Aramaic—into the heart of China. They had already taken it to the southern tip of India. (See Chapter 3, ‘Second interlude: The shield of faith’, p. 88.) Muslims too had come along the same trans-Asiatic route to spread their faith, which survives, especially on the coasts of China, to this day; and Islam is unthinkable without Arabic. Just recently, in the nineteenth century, Protestant Christian missions brought the first words in English into central Africa, and to most of the Pacific Islands. (See Chapter 12, ‘The world taken by storm’, pp. 507ff.)

Sadly, missionary motives are not always so peaceable. Put another way, dominant peoples sometimes feel an urge, usually conceived as a duty, to impose their faith on foreigners they have defeated, to ‘enlighten’ them. In extreme cases—not rare in the second millennium AD—the duty is sharpened into a righteous aggression: the believers must attempt to defeat their neighbours simply to impose their faith on them.

This ‘crusading’ motive seems particularly characteristic of the faiths derived from Hebrew revelation, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It has been mitigated for the Jews by the fact that they have almost always been in much smaller force than their enemies or neighbours, and hence can only endorse the doctrine nostalgically, recalling biblical tales of their early conquests. For Muslims, there was always the doctrine that ahl al-kitāb , Peoples of the Book—Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians along with Muslims themselves—were owed a special tolerance, and so a certain moderation was shown to most of those they defeated. It fell to Christians to try out the full rigours of waging aggressive and imperialistic wars in the name of religion.

The doctrine was forged in the crusades against Islam of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the Christians had insufficient advantage to create long-term dominance. But in the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even more in the Americas, forces were far less even. The kings of Spain and Portugal received formal authorisation to dispossess other kings, and establish their own empires, explicitly in order to extend the domains of the Catholic faith. [735]But it was one of the greater ironies of this global review to discover that all over Latin America it was the religious communities which tended to sustain use of America’s indigenous languages: Europe’s languages began to wipe the others out only when the special concern with and for natives lapsed. (See Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 373.) Whatever the Christians’ original intent, it was settlers, rather than missionaries or their crusading Faith, who spread languages.

Human nature may not change much, but in the last half-millennium—the period we have represented as Languages by Sea—some new factors have come into play which affected radically the capacity of languages to spread.

The first of these is global navigation. The motive for developing this was mercantile, a fifteenth-century European ambition to acquire Asian commodities, especially spices, more cheaply. The ambition was very soon fulfilled, but an immediate side effect was to operate in the reverse direction—the gradual establishment of speech communities of Europeans far away in Asia and the Americas, communities that very soon gained new members locally. It was no longer necessary for speech communities to be contiguous, or linked by brief cruises across familiar seas.

It is possible to quote forerunners for this breakthrough—the Chinese commerce with South-East Asia that briefly expanded to take in the whole Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century (see Chapter 4, ‘Language from Huang-he to Yangtze’, p. 147); the Arab, Persian and Indian traders who had taken the Indian Ocean for their domain in the early first millennium AD; the much earlier Polynesian mariners of the Pacific in their outrigger canoes, who island by island reached every habitable landmass there; indeed, the primeval navigators who many thousands of years ago made their way through the East Indies and across the Torres Straits to Australia. But none of these forerunners succeeded in mapping the whole world once and for all, providing the complete inventory of what lands there were to be discovered, and where they lay. In the sixteenth century, the world shrank from an open system to a closed and definite sphere, still dangerous but now for the first time manageable. Now it became conceivable that fellow-speakers could set up home on the other side of an ocean, indeed many oceans away: they might be hard to reach, but their address would be known. Though they were scattered across the world, contact could be maintained.

Once this network of discontinuous communities had been established, maintainable through regular sea traffic, the scope of inter-communal relations changed too. In the Americas, the onset of epidemic disease very quickly readjusted the relative size of resident and incomer communities, and in Latin America extensive interbreeding soon blurred the borders, linguistic and cultural, between them. As a result, the settler communities largely replaced, by incorporation or by simple displacement, the previous resident populations. [221]Nothing new there, except for the continental scale of what was happening; something analogous must have happened, for example, when the Romans invaded Gaul, or the Saxons took over England. But in India and the East Indies, the indigenous community was not vulnerable to disease brought by the immigrants: on the contrary, the diseases endemic there kept the immigrant population small. The result was a persistently small minority community of outsiders, the Europeans, living on the edge of the resident population, but increasingly influential within it. This was a new situation and the response to it, the spread of a language by re-education, was new too.

Effectively, the outsider minority passed its prestige language on to the elite of the majority, not as a lingua franca, but as a symbol of a kind of cultural recruitment. The novelty of this development is underlined by the fact that it happened in British India, but not in the highly similar Dutch East Indies. Both the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie and the English East India Company had brought a Germanic language to a long-standing commercial market in South Asia; both had succeeded in displacing European competitors, the Portuguese or the French; both had attracted Protestant missionary camp-followers who were keen to spread their spiritual world-view to the local population. But the Dutch were content always to use the local lingua franca, Malay, as the language for their religion, and their administration. The mijnheers’ own world was separate from that of their local suppliers, employees and (ultimately) subjects, and so it would remain. (See Chapter 11, ‘Dutch interlopers’, p. 395.) Only the British provided the means to switch to their own language, English. When they did this, they were yielding certainly to pressure from their own missionaries, but also from their home population and many elite Indians. The emerging new attitude to the colony demanded nothing less, seeing it not just as a place in which to make a profit, but as British India, to be developed as a part of Greater Britain.