Empires Of The Word Part 21

An unprecedented empire

Caliban to Prospero: You taught me language; and my profit on't

Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you,

For learning me your language!

Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611), i.2.1, 1.321 It is of note that the Indians of Peru, before we Christians had come to them, had certain and particular modes of swearing, distinct from ours. They had no a.s.sertive oaths, such as 'by G.o.d' or 'by heaven' but only execration or curses... e.g. 'if I am not telling the truth, may the sun kill me' they said mana checcanta iptiy, indi guauchiuancmancha... Once when I asked a chieftain in a certain province if he was a Christian, he said 'I am not yet quite one, but I am making a beginning.' I asked him what he knew of being Christian, and he said: 'I know how to swear to G.o.d, and play cards a bit, and I am beginning to steal.'

Fray Domingo Santo Tomas,

Arte de la Lengua General ... del Peru (1560), ch. Xxiii

The spread of Spanish into the Americas was the first linguistic effect of a totally new development in recorded human history. The Spanish and the Portuguese discovered, in the late fifteenth century, that a new technology, the ocean-going s.h.i.+p, powered by sail, and guided by the magnetic compa.s.s and an evolving knowledge of prevailing winds, could give them direct access to distant parts of the world. Although this came as a surprise to these navigating nations, the shock was much greater to the peoples already living in the parts of the world on to which they burst. The Arabs of the Indian Ocean instantly lost their monopoly of trade with India and China; the Indians, the Chinese and all between them faced a new military threat from rapacious Europeans. But for the inhabitants of the Americas, without a seafaring tradition of their own, and so isolated for millennia from the hazards of long-distance contact, it was a shock that was usually fatal.

The surprise of the Spanish irruption into the New World was registered in many ways. Spanish incomprehension can be seen in the permanent misnomer of their new subjects, called 'Indians' (indios) by Christopher Columbus.* It is also seen in Columbus's a.s.sumption, followed by many later chroniclers, that hostile Caribbean islanders were clearly cannibals (a term that as a result became synonymous with 'eaters of human flesh'). Never substantiated, this may have been a hangover from the traditions of European travellers' tales about the ends of the earth; Herodotus said that beyond the Scythians lived the flesh-eating Androphagi; and Strabo had retailed the same story about the Scythians themselves, and even the Irish.1 But the European mariners may have been misinterpreting-to fit with more conventional horror-the first evidence they were finding of the true, but for then still truly inconceivable, indigenous practices of human sacrifice.

Most directly for our purposes, the Spanish incomprehension can be seen in the linguists that Columbus had chosen to bring in the hope of easing communication: Luis de Torres, who knew Hebrew, Aramaic ('Chaldaean') and some Arabic, and Rodrigo de Jerez, who had perhaps visited some of the Portuguese colonies in Guinea. Although he may rationally have believed he could run into Arab traders when he reached China, his choice is eloquent of the sheer ignorance of what the rest of the world was like linguistically, when the only alien that even an educated Spaniard was likely to meet was a Moor or a Jew.* And indeed Spaniards went on calling the spiritual centres of the Americans 'mosques': for example, in a letter to his king in 1520, Cortes wrote, of a city in Mexico that had never seen a Muslim: 'And I a.s.sure your Majesty that I counted from a mosque some 430 towers in the said city, all of them belonging to mosques.'2 The incomprehension of the extent of the new horizons now opening up was of course not confined to the Spaniards. Seeing themselves quite explicitly as emissaries of Christendom in these new realms, they turned to the Pope-Alexander VI, conveniently a Spaniard-to validate their t.i.tle to the territories. It was a situation familiar to us from the modern rush for patents in the uncharted areas of information technology and genetics. In 1493 the Pope, after granting Spain sovereignty over Columbus's discoveries on his first voyage, went on to award it t.i.tle to all territories more than a hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, approximately longitude 30W, explicitly all the way to India. If it had become established, this would have given Spain rights to all the Americas. But no one could know this, a year after Columbus's first voyage. The Portuguese were at this stage the only major compet.i.tors and were duly concerned about the Pope's dispensation, above all in order to guarantee their routes through the Atlantic to Africa and beyond. They succeeded in negotiating with the Spaniards to have the north-south demarcation line moved 270 leagues farther west, effectively to longitude 45, and this notional limit was agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. It was never clearly identified in practice, and corresponds to no modern boundary-Brazil, for example, extends inland all the way to longitude 74W, and even on the coast as far as 50-but it did serve as a convenient rule of thumb, giving Portugal a prior claim to Brazil, whose south-eastern coast was first visited by both Spanish and Portuguese s.h.i.+ps in 1500, but inhibiting its interest in the Amazon until 1637.

On the American side, the shock of incomprehension was registered more brutally, by a devastating loss of population. It is impossible to estimate safely the numbers living in the Americas before European contact. Estimates vary between 13 million and 180 million. But everywhere there is evidence of a ma.s.sive fall in the early years after the Europeans arrived. First of all, the Spaniards complained of depopulation in the first islands they colonised, Cuba and Hispaniola, and the figures bear them out: a census of Hispaniola in 1496 gave a figure of 1.1 million, but just eighteen years later the repartimiento of 1514 listed 22,000. Mexico witnessed a series of epidemics, beginning with the Spanish visit to their capital Tenocht.i.tlan, which carried off most of the native population, and spread southward into Guatemala. Of the whole Caribbean, Joseph de Acosta was writing in the 1580s: 'the habitation of which coasts is ... so wasted and condemned that of thirty parts of the people that inhabit it there wants twenty-nine; and it is likely that the rest of the Indians will in short time decay'.3 Hernando de Soto led an expedition through Florida and the North American south-east in the mid-sixteenth century, finding a thick population of Indians, cl.u.s.tered in small cities, on the Mississippi river near modern Memphis. In 1682, when the area was next visited by white men (this time French), it was deserted.

The diseases travelled faster than the spearheads of Spanish conquest: smallpox arrived in Peru in 1525, Francisco Pizarro in 1532. It had already killed Huayna Capac, the Inca, and many of his relations, and precipitated the dynastic struggle that the Spaniards were to turn to their own advantage. Thereafter, as everywhere, further epidemics, of typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles as well as more smallpox, ravaged the population.

The Spanish were not notably humane conquerors, but they had no interest in genocide. From the first days in Hispaniola, they had hoped to exploit the labour of the natives, and for this alone they were dismayed at the sudden and disastrous collapse in their numbers. Yet everywhere, the fact that the previous population was melting away would have materially aided the long-term spread of the conquerors' language, changing the balance in numbers by subtracting predominantly from the speaker communities of the indigenous languages.

From the perspective of the world, with full benefit of hindsight, three aspects of the Spanish advance into the New World stand out as quite new to history.

One is that this was the first direct confrontation of races of human beings from quite separate lineages, divided by tens of thousands of years of independent development. The last common ancestor of Christopher Columbus and Guacanagari, the first king he encountered on Hispaniola, could not have lived less than two thousand generations before, a period over twenty times longer than the time elapsed since the birth of Christ. That common ancestor would have lived in Africa, and so the two men's lineages had to extend all round the world before they could meet. From that moment onward, contacts would no longer be restricted by this intrinsic linearity in the human settlement of the world: nation would speak unto nation, from anywhere to anywhere.

This aspect was fundamental to the special catastrophe that, as we have seen, hit the American population. It turned out that the long millennia of development that had culminated in America and Spain had given the European lineage an attribute that acted like a secret weapon: resistance to a variety of diseases which, since they were endemic, were likely to spread to any other population with which they were in contact. This, far more than the technical superiority in arms which meant they could win battles against overwhelming numbers, eliminated swathes of the native population before they had any chance to adapt culturally, or rally in the long term. It is this biological factor, above all, which explains why the majority population in the Hispanic countries of America nowadays is everywhere mestizo.

The second unprecedented aspect of the Spanish advance is that this was the first conquest of a foreign continent by seaborne invasion. Maritime empires had certainly been a feature of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean (Athens, Carthage and Venice stand out), and in the first millennium AD Indians had projected their civilisation across the Bay of Bengal, though without apparent military intent. Only eighty years before the Spanish founded their empire, China's Admiral Zheng-He had cruised the Indian Ocean, exacting tribute from Sri Lanka, and demonstrating that China was capable of reaching the eastern coasts of Africa, if it so chose. But no previous empire had been gained or maintained through the control of oceanic seaways. Now for the first time a subject territory could be a continent away from its government, the link maintained through the projection of power by a navy across oceans.

Third, the conquest of the New World was the first major invasion to be undertaken in a number of independent initiatives, often by free enterprise, even if the adelantados-'advance men', as the pioneer captains-general were known, their t.i.tle previously reserved for the governors of frontier provinces facing the Muslims-all claimed to be acting on behalf of the king of Spain. The invasion forces tended to be so small (607 with Cortes in Mexico, 160 with Pizarro in Peru) that the defending leaders were misled as to the nature of the threat, and delayed fatally in their defences by attempting to negotiate with, or at least to observe, their unwanted Spanish visitors. The New World was conquered through a patchwork of campaigns of soldier adventurers: Columbus in the Caribbean (1490s), Cortes in Mexico, Alvarado in Guatemala, Garcia in Bolivia, Pizarro in Peru (1520s), Quesada in New Granada (the future Colombia), Mendoza in Argentina (1530s), de Soto in Florida, Coronado in Texas, Cabrillo in California, Valdivia in Chile (1540s), to mention only the most famous or successful. Each campaign was aimed primarily at enriching its partic.i.p.ants, even while the formal justification was to demand wider loyalty to the king, and to save souls by gaining converts to the True Church.

These three aspects of the event usher in a radically new age, and were to become commonplace features of the major language contacts to come, as maritime nations of Europe sent fleets to every temperate and tropical part of the world that possessed a coastline, and attempted to claim them as colonies, and their people as customers, subjects and converts. This sequence of conquests marked the crucial transition in the development of the fully global world of today, where practically anywhere on the planet is within twenty-four hours' travel of anywhere else.*

Almost as an afterthought, the conquest of the Americas did eventually serve the purpose with which Columbus had set out, a link with Asia. In 1565, on the instructions of King Philip II, an expedition from Mexico crossed the Pacific to the islands of Cebu and Luzon, and established the beginnings of Spanish dominion in what was to be the Philippines. Other smaller Spanish colonies in the Pacific included the Marianas and Guam. Spanish control, and the attempt to spread the Spanish language here, was to last until the USA took over in 1898, after winning the Spanish-American War.

Since these Pacific colonies were gained at much the same time as the Americas, but were very much part of the Old World of the spice islands, on the edge of India's and China's zones of influence, they provide a useful contrast to highlight the special features of the progress of Spanish in the New World. Spanish never made widespread or deep-seated progress in the Philippines, and despite over three centuries of presence was soon displaced by English in the early twentieth century. It will be interesting to ponder the roots of the difference with Spanish in the Americas, where despite US economic dominance Spanish is still growing at the expense of English.

One can state at the outset that the conquest of the Philippines did not share in all the unprecedented properties of the conquest of the Americas. It was, admittedly, a seaborne invasion, and its point of origin was, like many expeditions of exploration into North America, in Mexico. But the land targeted was part of the Old World, not the New, and hence did not suffer from the disastrous lack of immunity to European diseases which devastated America: the advent of the Spanish was not followed in the Pacific by any collapse in the native population. Furthermore, the settlement of the Philippines did not proceed by individual groups spreading out to explore and exploit in their own interest. It was a Spanish government foundation, set up first at Cebu, and then, more permanently, in Manila. Thereafter, expansion of Spanish presence, and hence the Spanish language, came through the (more or less) disinterested activities of missionaries. The Philippines lacked the precious metals found in the Americas, and were much harder to reach from Spain, since the only barely practical route lay through Mexico: the colony offered little practical incentive for a Spanish-speaking community to grow and expand.

First c.h.i.n.ks in the language barrier:

Interpreters, bilinguals, grammarians

General de Quesada tried to find out what people were arrayed against him. There was an Indian whom they had captured with two cakes of salt and who had led them to where they were in this realm, and who through conversation already spoke a few words of Spanish. The General had him ask some Indians of the country whom he had captured to serve as interpreters. They replied in their language with the words musca puenunga, which is the phrase for 'many people'. The Spaniards who heard it said: 'they say they are like flies [moscas]'... [Quesada] gave them a blast from the arquebuses. Then when the Indians saw that without coming up to them the Spaniards were killing them, without waiting a moment they took flight; our men gave chase and attacked them, until the great host came apart and disappeared. In the pursuit they say that the Spanish said: 'There were more of these than flies; but they have taken flight like flies'; with which the name [Mosca] was fixed for them; and this a.s.sault finished off the whole war.

Juan Rodriguez Freyle, Conquest and discovery of the New Kingdom of Granada,

ch. vi (written in 1636, describing events in the region of Bogota in 1536)

Perhaps disappointed by the inadequate, because misguided, linguistic support he had brought on his first voyage, Columbus had kidnapped a handful of the people in his s.h.i.+ps as he sailed onward around the islands he was exploring, and then taken them back to Spain. 'It appeared to him that he should take to Castile, from this Isle of Cuba or the mainland as he was already reckoning it to be, some Indians so that they might learn the tongue of Castile and to know from them the secrets of the land, and in order to instruct them in the matters of the faith.'4 Several of them were presented at court, and received baptism, with royal G.o.dparents, no less. Most of them either died in Spain or took flight as soon as they returned to the Indies, and only one of them, now (after baptism) known as Diego Colon, did service as an interpreter. Columbus had at first been under the impression that all the 'Indians' he met spoke the same language; but the limited usefulness of Diego as he toured even the rest of the Caribbean islands gave him, first of the Europeans, an inkling of how diverse the language stock of these lands really was.

This kind of attempt to capture likely lads and train them up as interpreters was never a great success, although persisted with for thirty years or so. It caused resentment when candidates were taken by force-the native populations of Taino Indians already had bitter experience in their own culture of raids by neighbours for enslavement and human sacrifice-and far too often the apprentices died in the unnatural setting of life in Europe.

More effective was the natural process whereby an isolated Spaniard, s.h.i.+pwrecked or on the run from his own people, would take up life in an Indian village, and so get to know their language, before returning to act as interpreter. There are a good dozen such cases on record.5 One of these turned out to be crucial for the first Spanish advance into the interior of America, when in 1519 Cortes penetrated to the heart of the Mexican empire. He communicated through a relay of two interpreters, one of them Jeronimo de Aguilar, a Spaniard who had spent eight years in a Mayan village after a s.h.i.+pwreck on the coast of Yucatan, the other the famous Malin-tzin, a Nahuatl-speaking woman from Coatzacoalcos who had been traded to a nearby Mayan community, Xicalango, in childhood.

As interpreters of Spanish, many native trainees remained rather inadequate, lacking the background to understand the Spaniards' real interests, even if they were as self-motivated as the Peruvian Felipillo, who had 'learnt the [Spanish] language without anyone teaching him ... [and] was the first interpreter that Peru had'.6 He was the main interpreter during the conquest of Peru, and mediated the first, crucial, conversation with Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, just before the decisive battle of Cajamarca. Felipillo was called on to translate a harsh and pithy address by the Dominican friar, Fray Vicente Valverde, which ran through the basic doctrines of Christianity, the apparent duty of the Pope and the Spanish emperor Charles to convert the world, and the consequent need for Atahuallpa to submit to them without further ado.

Atahuallpa's reply is transmitted by Inca Garcilaso, himself a mestizo bilingual in Spanish and the Inca language Quechua, but also a highly educated student of Ciceronian rhetoric, writing more than a lifetime after the event. By his account, the poverty of the translation seems to have vitiated any chance that understanding, or at least courtesy, could be maintained. Atahuallpa is supposed to have replied at length, starting with a comment on the poor quality of the interpreting: It would have caused me great satisfaction, since you deny everything else I have requested of your messengers, that you should at least have granted me one request, that of addressing me through a skilled and faithful translator. For the urbanity and social life of men is more readily understood through speech than by customs, since even though you may be endowed with great virtues, if you do not manifest them by words, I shall not easily be able to perceive them by observation and experience. And if this is needful among all peoples and nations, it is much more so between those who come from such widely different regions as we; if we seek to deal and talk through interpreters and messengers who are ignorant of both languages it will be as though we were conversing through the mouths of beasts of burden.7 A speech of this level of elaboration was evidently going to floor such a simple interpreter as Felipillo, but it is most likely a fiction of Garcilaso's, in accord with the best traditions of cla.s.sical history-writing. Nevertheless, Garcilaso does claim that the Spaniards 'who were unable to brook the length of the discourse, had left their places and fallen on the Indians'. So intolerance of long-windedness in an unknown language perhaps played a role in the action that did develop.

After the conquests were achieved and Spaniards installed in positions of power, there was little in the new economic order that was established, with native inhabitants of a region a.s.signed to work on the land or in mines, that would have encouraged widespread diffusion of the Spanish language. Repet.i.tive duties among static populations would minimise the need for communication between master and subject. There was nothing a.n.a.logous to military service in the Roman empire, or the spread of monasteries and universities in medieval Europe, which would diffuse the language of the Spanish masters around their domains. There was, in any case, a constant flow of Spanish speakers emigrating from Spain itself to boost the speaker population. Yet a substantial number of bilinguals would have been needed to organise the work of the natives. They would have arisen naturally as the Spanish immigrants, overwhelmingly male, took Indian wives or mistresses (mancebas) and began to raise families with them. Their children, known as mestizos, would learn both languages from their parents. 'As early as 1503, the Court recommends to the governor of Hispaniola that some Christians should marry some Indian women, so that they may communicate with and teach one another.'8 Such enthusiasm for the Nueva Raza, the 'new race' generated by these interracial unions, is one feature that strongly distinguishes Spanish imperialism from the att.i.tudes of later Anglo-Saxon empire-builders. Among the famous conquistadores, almost every one had mestizo children, often with several different women, and they were fully recognised as heirs to their fathers. Cortes, Pizarro, Benalcazar and Alvarado all conform to this tradition; indeed, Pope Clement VII officially legitimised three sons of Cortes in a bull of 1529, although he did temporise a little: 'the virtues' beauty purges in the sons the stain of the birth, and with the purity of customs the shame of origin is effaced'.

So common was interracial matrimony (soon complicated by the import of black slaves from Africa) that a taxonomy of the terms for mixed-race children was devised, and famously ill.u.s.trated.9 Modern Hispanic commentators tend to idealise this state of affairs, referring, for example, to the mixed racial background of the Spanish in Europe, but the facts that the attempt was made to keep everyone cla.s.sified, and that the power and status of the nominally pure Spanish families (criollos) remained high until the end of the empire-exceeded indeed only by that of immigrants from Spain-suggest that the society was not so free of race-based oppression as is sometimes claimed. However, whatever the level of acceptance and encouragement of the various types of union that were solemnised (or not), there is very little doc.u.mentary evidence of language usage in these families.

What evidence there is comes from the unchallengeable fact of literary distinction in many early mestizos. They were not only interpreters, but also literary translators and authors, in Spanish and in Latin too.* Fernando de Alva Ixtilxochitl, from the line of the kings of Tezcoco, Cortes' allies, was known as the 'Livy of Anahuac', author of the Historia Chichimeca. And his son Bartolome adapted into Nahuatl two contemporary Spanish plays by Lope de Vega, and another by Calderon. They were not alone; chronicles of the conquest of all parts of the empires of the New World were soon being written up, in Spanish, by the very people produced by that conquest.10 The most distinguished of the literary mestizos was probably the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), born in Cuzco, the Inca capital, seven years after the conquest, his father being the Spanish n.o.bleman Captain Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas, and his mother Palla Chimpu Ocllo, second cousin of the two last Incas, Huayna Capac and Atahuallpa. He emigrated to Spain in his early twenties, and lived there until his death, so his career says little directly about the relative strength of languages in Peru. But he was a man familiar with the sense of different languages: having learnt Quechua and Spanish as a child, and Latin in his youth, he had then learnt sufficient Italian to translate a book ent.i.tled Dialogues of Love. He went on to write two lengthy historical works of his own, The Florida of the Inca, about de Soto's campaign through Florida, and a two-part history called Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. In this last work, he has a lot to say about the relative roles of the Quechua and Spanish languages, often quoting the views of another famous literary mestizo, Father Blas Valera (who had written a history of Peru in Latin).

It was Garcilaso and Blas Valera's view that the advent of Spanish power to Peru, with the civil wars and social disruption that it brought in its train, had disrupted the convenient linguistic unity that the Incas had succeeded in imposing over their empire, and which should have been exploited in the propagation of the Christian faith.

Whence it has come about that many provinces, where when the Spaniards entered Cajamarca the rest of the Indians knew this common language, have now forgotten it altogether, because with the end of the world and Empire of the Incas, there was no-one to remember something so convenient and necessary for the preaching of the Holy Gospel, because of the widespread oblivion caused by the wars which arose among the Spaniards, and after that for other causes which the evil Satan has sown to prevent such an advantageous regime from being put into operation ... There are some to whom it appears sensible to oblige all the Indians to learn the Spanish language, so that the priests should not waste their efforts on learning the Indian one. This opinion can leave no-one who hears it in any doubt that it arose from failure of endeavour rather than stupid thinking ...11 It has been claimed12 that Garcilaso's underlying point was that the Incas understood better than their conquerors the fundamental point of Nebrija, whose ground-breaking grammar of Spanish-as we have seen-had begun with the thesis 'that always language was the companion of empire'. Garcilaso certainly held the view, still widely held today though not among knowledgeable linguists, that a shared language makes for common understanding and good mutual relations: 'because the likeness and conformity of words almost always tend to reconcile people and bring them to true union and friends.h.i.+p'.13 Whatever the truth on this point of ideology, the existence of Antonio Nebrija's works, grammars both of Latin (Introductiones Latinae) and contemporary Spanish (Gramatica de la lengua castellana), demonstrated that it was possible to capture the 'art' of a language explicitly on the page. And the missionaries soon flocking to the New World made use of this demonstration to found the world's first tradition of descriptive linguistics.

Entering Mexico, this new virgin territory for the Church, where bilinguals hardly existed at any level of society, the Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian friars immediately realised that they would have to work through the people's own languages if they were to make serious progress in spreading the faith.* This meant the languages would have to be learnt. The population to be contacted was vast: many million to set against the 802 friars present in Mexico in 1557.14 Clearly, this was work for many generations. And since there would necessarily be a circulation of missionaries, with old ones retiring and fresh recruits coming out from Spain-i.e. the tradition had to be carried on without the natural transmission of languages through raising children-the languages would have to be taught afresh, over and over, to each new generation of adult learners. For the first time in the world's history, there was a clear demand for language-learning textbooks, specifically grammars ('Artes') and dictionaries, as well as native-language versions of the prayer books and confessionals that were the tools of the Catholic missionary's trade.

And conveniently enough, there were now the technical means to satisfy the demand: printing presses were installed in Mexico City in 1535; their first known product, the Breve y mas compendiosa doctrina Christiana, which came out in 1539, was for ecclesiastical use, and despite its t.i.tle was written in Nahuatl. In 1546 it was followed by Fray Alonso de Molina's Doctrina Christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana, and in 1547 by Arte de la lengua mexicana by Father Andres de Olmos, and an accompanying volume, Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana. Volumes in others of the country's languages followed, beginning with expositions of Christian doctrines in Huastec in 1548 and Mixtec in 1550. Peru could not wait for the press, and the first Arte of the Quechua language, Grammatica, o arte de la lengua general de los Indios de los Reynos del Peru, was actually printed in Spain, in Valladolid, in 1560. But when printing started in Lima (Peru) in 1583, among its first products were Catecismo en Lengua Espaola y Quichua, Catecismo en Lengua Espaola y Aymara (both 1583), and Doctrina Christiana... traduzido en las dos lenguas generales de este Reyno, Quichua y Aymara (1584).15 This was just scratching the surface of the unknown continent's languages. The ultimate harvest of linguistic knowledge that was gained in the Americas, primarily to serve missionary activity, was vast. In 1892 the Count of Viaza listed 493 distinct languages identified by Spanish linguists in the Americas over three and a half centuries of research, and the t.i.tles of significant doc.u.ments describing some aspect of 369 of them. In that period 667 separate authors had produced 1,188 works.16 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 inst.i.tution 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, s.h.i.+ft 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.

Past struggles: How American languages had spread

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'.17 The peoples he met as he cruised down the coasts of what are now Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama must have spoken Paya, Miskitu, Guaimi 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. Hernandez de Cordoba, who in 1517 ran along the north and east of the Yucatan, 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.* Then in 1518 Juan de Grijalva undertook a longer coastal exploration, with more stops in the Yucatan, 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.18 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 Rio de la Plata and the Gran Chaco, it found a vast area where everyone spoke Tupinamba or Guarani,* 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 establis.h.i.+ng effective communications. By an amazing stroke of fortune, all but one (Tupinamba) 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 Potosi 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.

The spread of Nahuatl

Zan iwki nonyaz in oompoliwi socitl ah?

Antle notleyo yez in kenmanian?

Antle nihtawka yez in tlaltikpak?

Ma nel socitl, ma nel kwikatl!

Ken konsiwaz noyollo, yewaya?

On nen tonkizako in tlaltikpak.

Shall I just go like the flowers which were fading?