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

Looking back on this immense multilingualism of the Americas revealed by the penetration of the Spanish empire, we almost quail at the enormity of what the Spaniards took on. For the spread of Spanish as the first or second language of people from so many different traditions was by no means inevitable.

The situation of Spanish in its empire in the sixteenth century, and even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was very different from that of English in the nineteenth or twentieth. Although the empire was an open institution for the Spaniards, who continued to emigrate to the colonies until these achieved independence in the early nineteenth century, it was something else for the indigenous rural population, the speakers of those 493 or so alien languages. For most of them, often living in the collective settlements called reducciones , there was little mobility, physical, economic or social, except perhaps through the Church hierarchy. They might be looked after by priests who spoke their languages, but otherwise they were quite segregated from contact with the Spanish masters. The Indians were offered a ticket to salvation in the next world, but not to any sort of advancement in this one. It was a situation more like that of medieval Europe than that of the Reformation. Hence there could be no rapid, or automatic, shift towards Spanish, outside the mestizo communities and the towns.

One can even speculate that if some political force had undercut, or superseded, Spanish control of the continent in that period, Spanish would have faded away very fast. After all, we can recall what happened to Sanskrit in South-East Asia at the end of the first millennium, or to Greek in the Near East when the Parthians and then Muslims advanced: both these were in similar situations to Spanish, top-level languages that remained the preserve of a small elite. There is even a comparative experiment to prove our point, since the Spaniards were indeed expelled from their Pacific colonies at the end of the nineteenth century.

But before we consider how Spanish came to consolidate its hold on the American population, we need to consider the varied backgrounds of some of the American languages that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were still widely spoken and hardly losing ground.

Early on, as we have seen, Columbus was dispirited by the vast numbers of languages, with no mutual understanding among their speakers, which he encountered on his voyages. First running along the coast of the American mainland, Tierra Firme , he noted to his disappointment that ‘they no more understand one another than we do the Arabs’. [532]The peoples he met as he cruised down the coasts of what are now Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama must have spoken Paya, Miskitu, Guaimí and Kuna.

There was no relief from this apparently boundless babel when the Spaniards, from a base in Santiago de Cuba, began to explore the coastline farther north. Hernández de Córdoba, who in 1517 ran along the north and east of the Yucatán, could have encountered only (Yucatec) Maya in his two landfalls: a single language to be sure, but distinct from any the Spanish had previously encountered—and there is no sign that any attempt was made to identify or learn anything of the language. [101]Then in 1518 Juan de Grijalva undertook a longer coastal exploration, with more stops in the Yucatán, and one at Xicallanco, where he would have encountered a different Maya language, called by the Spanish Chontal de Tabasco—though its own speakers now call it Yokot’an—and then further stops at Potonchan, where the language would have been Zapotec, followed by two more in the region of modern Vera Cruz, where the language was Totonac. Sign language remained the best means of communication for the time being.

This was not an encouraging beginning, if the Spaniards were hoping to establish widespread communications with the Indians; but it was not unrepresentative: at least two thousand distinct languages were being spoken in the Americas at the time, 350 of them in the central regions of Mexico and the isthmus which the Spanish explored first. [533]

Nevertheless, when the Spaniards succeeded first in contacting, and then conquering, the few great multinational states that America had already produced, they found that Nebrija’s dictum, indeed predictive theory, ‘that always language was the companion of empire’ was amply borne out in the New World. The two great ancient empires of the Americas, the Aztecs and the Incas, had spread use of their languages throughout their realms, covering most of central Mexico and the central and southern Andes down to the Pacific Ocean. Less spectacular in terms of political and social development, but still highly gratifying to Spaniards in quest of gold, the Chibchan settlements in the northern Andes (at the centre of what is now Colombia) were characterised by a widespread common language, known as Muisca. And when Spain reached the southern region of the Río de la Plata and the Gran Chaco, it found a vast area where everyone spoke Tupinambá or Guaraní, [102]two closely related and mutually intelligible languages. Farther south still, in the chilly and mountainous land of Araucania, the Mapuche, so warlike that they were successfully to resist Spanish takeover until the mid-nineteenth century, were also united by a common language, called Mapudungun.

These languages of wide extent were very much the exception, understood over less than 10 per cent of the territory of central and south America; but this territory was very highly populated, with perhaps as much as 40 per cent of the people. The widespread languages were to prove highly useful to an invading power, since when standardised as auxiliary languages in the new empire they could short-circuit the long and laborious process of establishing effective communications. By an amazing stroke of fortune, all but one (Tupinambá) turned out to be spoken in the parts of the continent that the Spanish were to make their own. This jumbo set of linguistic advantages may be one reason why the economic development of Spain’s empire in the Americas began at least a century sooner than those of Portugal, France or Britain. The vast support systems underlying the large-scale mining of gold in Zacatecas in Mexico, and of silver in Potosí in the Andes, would have been impossible without some common language, but the language was not in those days Spanish.

These large-scale languages had not always been so widespread. Before looking at the use the Spanish made of them, it is worth considering the processes by which these indigenous linguistic areas arose.

Zan iwki nonyaz in oompoliwi šocitl ah?

Antle notleyo yez in kenmanian?

Antle nihtawka yez in tlaltikpak?

Ma nel šocitl, ma nel kwikatl!

Ken konšiwaz noyollo, yewaya?

On nen tonkizako in tlaltikpak.

Shall I just go like the flowers which were fading?

Will my glory be nothing one day?

Will my fame be nothing in the earth?

At least flowers, at least songs!

Alas, what will my heart do?

In vain do we pass this way across the earth!

Nahuatl lyric ( Cantares Mexicanos , folio 10 recto, ll. 23ff.)

First in terms of magnificence, and also in population, was the realm where Nahuatl was spoken. [103]This language was usually known in the Spanish period as lengua mexicana , since the Aztecs, as we have seen (see Prologue), referred to themselves as Mexica, and their land as Mexico. [104]But this language had never been exclusive to the Aztec community. Specifically, when Cortés arrived in the valley of Mexico in 1519, Nahuatl was spoken by their neighbours in Tlaxcallan to the east also, outside the circle of the Aztecs’ vassal states, neighbours who, as it turned out, were ready to ally themselves with the Spanish against their fellow-speakers of Nahuatl. But this was just one of the last traces of a distribution of Nahuatl that pre-dated the Aztecs. In fact, there is evidence that the language’s presence in the general area of central Mexico goes back at least to the seventh century AD, when the monumental city of Teotihuacán was destroyed by fire: at that time the Pipil community are supposed to have moved south, through some interaction with the then dominant Toltec civilisation. The Toltecs left little concrete trace except a memory hallowed among the Aztecs who assumed control of central Mexico after them: but of the Pipil descendants who are left today, living far to the south in El Salvador, twenty or so still speak a form of Nahuatl. The straightforward assumption is that Nahuatl was the language of almost all the people living in the Valley of Mexico around the turn of the first millennium AD, encircling what was then a vast lake: the Tepanecs of Atzcapotzalco on the north-western shore, the states of Tezcoco and Culhuacán, apparently successors of the Toltecs, on the eastern. There were also areas of Nahuatl farther afield, westward in Jalisco on the Pacific coast, and eastward in the isthmus of Tehuantepec, perhaps remnants of an earlier empire, centred on the Toltecs or even Teotihuacán.