Empires Of The Word Part 24

Gradually we move away from the animals more and more. In the first times, the difference was tiny. All living beings had an Ache body, a person's body, and behaved as such. The main likeness was the possession of javu, language.

Ache Pyve, 'The Beginnings of the Ache',

Ache-Guarani creation myth28

Far less is known about the careers of the other languages that had become widespread before the advent of the Spaniards.

The altiplano of Cundinamarca in the northern Andes was largely monolingual in the Chibcha (or Muysca) language when the Spanish arrived in 1536; the area was not politically unified at the time, however, and with at least three major centres at Tunja (Hunza) in the north, Bogota (Muykyta) in the south, and Sogamoso (Sugamusi), a major religious centre in the northeast, there was also some difference in dialects. The conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada (like Cortes, another lawyer at large) had brought interpreters with him from the coast, but, in view of the coastal languages as they are now (for example, Ika, Kogi), it is unlikely that they could have communicated in anything like their own language: more probably, they had some knowledge of Chibcha from traditional trade links between the mountains and the coast. Although there was already a clear social hierarchy among the Chibcha, and military organisation a.s.sociated with formal campaigns among the different centres (as well as their non-Chibcha-speaking neighbours), there is no evidence that the language had been spread by any political, military or economic influence. More likely, the language had simply been established by the tribes who had settled there. And their ethnic group had clearly been there for some time: closely related languages had evolved a couple of hundred kilometres to the north-east, among the Duit (nowadays extinct), and the Tunebo (also known as Uwa), who still live, and speak their language, on the eastern slopes of the Andes.

Even less is known about the background of Tupi-Guarani, but the language was spoken far more widely across lowland South America; forms of it have been found as far north as Suriname, north of the Amazon, and to the west in pockets on the Brazilian and Peruvian borders of Colombia. It was spoken (as Tupinamba) all over the centre and south-east of Brazil, in eastern Bolivia (known as Chiriguano), and in Paraguay (as Guarani). Its spread may have been linked to the progress of Mesoamerican-style farming across the continent, of maize, beans and squash, supplemented with potatoes, manioc, peanuts and chili peppers.29 And of the Mapuche past, even less is known or can be inferred. They maintained their independence until the second half of the nineteenth century; and so Spanish contact with them came too late for any use of their language, Mapudungun, as a lengua general. The use of a single language across their extensive territory suggests that they were a single group who had taken possession of a not particularly fertile region, and were thinly spread across it.

We must now turn to the policies pursued by the Spanish to organise their colonies linguistically. But before we do so, it is worth pointing out that there is a clear correlation between the degree of political organisation of a group with a widespread language, and the development of a literature after Spanish contact (which took advantage of the transmission of a Romanised writing system). There are substantial literatures in Nahuatl and Quechua which date from the period immediately after the conquest, often written by immediate descendants of the elite who had ruled Mexico and Peru before.* Aymara, Chibcha and Guarani, by contrast, did not develop an indigenous written literature, even though they had each been given a written standard by missionary linguists:30 as far as we can see, literature in the languages remained confined to the productions of the Spaniards, and largely to support the process of Christianisation.

The Church's solution: The lenguas generales

Your Majesty has ordered that these Indians should learn the language of Castile. That can never be, unless it were something vaguely and badly learnt: we see a Portuguese, where the language of Castile and Portugal is almost all the same, spend thirty years in Castile, and never learn it. Then are these people to learn it, when their language is so foreign to ours, with exquisite manners of speaking? It seems to me that Your Majesty should order that all the Indians learn the Mexican language, for in every village today there are many Indians who know it and learn it easily, and a very great number who confess in that language. It is an extremely elegant language, as elegant as any in the world. A grammar and dictionary of it have been written, and many parts of the Holy Scriptures have been translated into it; and collections of sermons have been made, and some friars are very great linguists in it.

Fray Rodrigo de la Cruz to Emperor Charles V

Mexico, letter of 4 May [March?] 155031

We are too few to teach the language of Castile to Indians. They do not want to speak it. It would be better to make universal the Mexican language, which is widely current, and they like it, and in it there are written doctrine and sermons and a grammar and a vocabulary.

Fray Juan de Mansilla, Comisario General, to Emperor Charles V

Guatemala, letter of 8 September 155132

If the Spanish with very sharp intellects and knowledge of the sciences cannot, as they claim, learn the general language of Cuzco, how can it be achieved that the uncultivated and untaught Indians can learn Castilian?

Father Blas Valera Peru, mid-sixteenth century33 In the papal bull of 1493 issued by Alexander VI, Inter Caetera, which formed the legal t.i.tle of Spain to its colonies, and in the instructions issued to Columbus by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the conversion of the natives was enjoined as the supreme objective in building the Spanish empire in the New World. Already in 1504, Father Boyl, who had been sent out with Columbus on his second voyage, was explaining to his royal masters that the spread of the gospel was being delayed by lack of interpreters.

Nevertheless, speedy progress was made with the Christianisation of the Caribbean, largely through Spanish. As we have seen, there was a babel of different languages in use in the Caribbean, and with no lingua franca the only alternative would have been to use each and every one of them. Cardinal Cisneros in 1516 required sacristans to teach the children of chieftains and important people to read and write, 'and to show them how to speak Castilian Romance, and to work with all the chiefs and Indians, as far as possible, to get them to speak Castilian'.34 Twenty copies of Nebrija's Arte de la lengua castellana were delivered to Hispaniola in 1513, sent from the governmental Casa de Contratacion de Indias. The process was effective in its intermediate goal of spreading Spanish. There are many reports of native chiefs who were masters of the language, and literate in it.35 But in the slightly longer term, the real aim, a new community of Christian souls, was frustrated by the disconcerting tendency of the Indians to die off, under the extreme stress of Spanish exploitation, followed up by wholesale import of black slaves from Africa. At any rate, in a situation of catastrophic collapse of population, and no segregation of Spaniards from Indians, it is unsurprising that only the Spanish language survived.

The spread of Spanish power to the continent created a very different situation. Partly by virtue of the campaigning fury of Father de Las Casas, partly from the sheer fact of depopulation, there was already a guilty sense of what rampant exploitation had done to the largely innocent islanders of the Caribbean, and (at least in the Church and the royal court) a determination that this should not recur. The religious orders spread out across the new colonies, and immediately endeavoured to reach the inhabitants in their own languages.

Because of the prior activities of the Indians which we have just reviewed, they found that in many of the territories the linguistic situation was much more manageable than it had been in the Caribbean. Some languages were already widespread; and even if they were not known to the whole population, everyone knew of them, and usually found them easier to acquire than the wholly alien Spanish.

After a generation of work in the field, a direction was issued by the royal court on 7 June 1550, to the effect that the new citizens of Spain should as soon as possible be taught the Spanish language: As one of the main things that we desire for the good of this land is the salvation and instruction and conversion to our Holy Catholic Faith of its natives, and that also they should adopt our policy and good customs; and so, treating of the means which could be upheld to this end, it is apparent that one of them and the most princ.i.p.al would be to give the order how these peoples may be taught our Castilian language, for with this knowledge, they could be more easily taught the matters of the Holy Gospel and gain all the rest which is suitable for their manner of life.36 There was immediate resistance from the churchmen called to act on it. The nature of their arguments is clear from the quotations that head this section. Means for the propagation of the faith were already to hand, they said, and these used the languages widely spoken in the major centres of population. It seemed pointless to try to subst.i.tute Spanish. And even where there was not an appropriate and effective lengua general, they still felt that native languages were the best for their purposes. The Archbishop of Bogota wrote to the king on 12 February 1577: And to take them by the hand and gather them by good means I have arrived at the best way for it, and none that I have found will compare with preaching and declaring the Holy Gospel in their own languages. I say 'in their own languages', because in this Kingdom every valley or province has its own language different from the others; it is not like Peru or New Spain, where although there are different languages, they have a lengua general in use throughout the land.37 There are those who say that the Church was not wholly disinterested in its promotion of the use of indigenous languages here. Maintenance of contact through the lengua general or other less accessible languages meant that the priests remained the sole effective channel between the pure-blood Indians (99 per cent of the population of Mexico at the turn of the sixteenth century, and still 55 per cent in 1810)38 and the rest of the world. Besides holding them as some sort of power base, they could shelter them from the pernicious doctrines of the Reformation which were circulating in Europe, and to some extent protect the Indians from rapacious Spanish colonial interests. But there is no evidence that the Church deliberately restricted access to Spanish: rather, they made it part of the curriculum, along with Latin, in all their schools. It simply failed to catch on among Indians, largely isolated as they were in remote settlements, or in segregated communities (reducciones), with few non-bilingual Spaniards to talk to.

In any case, the reaction of the Spanish Crown was emollient. No immediate enforcement of the Real Cedula was attempted under Carlos V. Some of the clergy in America were convinced that efforts should be made to make Spanish compulsory 'within some adequate term', because there was no clear, standard terminology in which to preach.39 In 1586 Felipe II commanded the viceroy of Peru to look into the matter, and take whatever measures seemed best; but in 1596 he rejected a draft Cedula which would have provided for the compulsory teaching of Spanish to Indians in New Spain, along with prohibition of any of their chiefs talking to his people in their own language, adding the personal note: 'Consult me on this and the whole issue here.' When on 3 July the Cedula was finally signed, it contained instead the instruction to 'put in place schoolmasters for those who would voluntarily wish to learn the Castilian language', but to ensure that 'the curates should know very well the language of the Indians whom they have to instruct'.

The result, maintained for the next two centuries, was very much the continuation of the status quo: Spanish in the cities, and increasingly in mestizo society; but elsewhere the lenguas generales were in use, and failing that other indigenous languages. The outcome in the long term seems to have depended on the prevalence of separate Indian settlements: for example, in New Granada, where these were few, the use of Chibcha gradually died out despite its recognition as an official lengua general, and Spanish replaced it. Nevertheless, even here Indian languages survived in remote areas. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Peru and Paraguay the lenguas generales flourished, in speech and in writing, even as small communities went on speaking their own languages.

What now occurred was a process whereby the content of the Spanish world-view was conveyed through the pre-existing languages of wider currency. The Spanish were spared the trouble of teaching their own language widely, or waiting a few generations for knowledge of it to spread; instead, they acquired, and turned to their advantage, the old languages, whether these had been spread by previous ruling powers-notably the Mexica, the Inca and (to a limited extent) the Chibcha-or were simply pre-existing languages of trade and intercourse-notably Aymara in southern Peru and Bolivia, and Guarani in Paraguay.

The most flouris.h.i.+ng of these in these first two centuries of Spanish rule was certainly Nahuatl. Since Spanish rule in Mexico created a 'republic of the Indians' separate from that of the Spaniards, and with separate courts, administrative use of the language was thriving. Moreover, there was not only a major effort by Spanish clergy to translate and publish liturgical material, supplemented as we have seen with linguistic a.n.a.lysis to aid in the training of Spanish learners; there was soon also a literature that recreated and retold the pre-Hispanic history of the country. This included above all the writing of history and of lyrical poetry. Besides the old genres, however, new ones were added: psalms, such as this one, composed by the Nahuatl encyclopedist, Fray Bernardo de Sahagun: 'The precious jades that I also shape with my lips, that I also have scattered, that I have uttered, are a fitting song. Not only are all these a gift for you, beloved son, you who are a son of the holy Church; even more are your due ... if you follow Christianity well as a way of life...',40 and the auto, or religious play, which continued the Mexican dramatic tradition in the service of the Christian faith. Motolinia, one of the heroic group of twelve missionaries first sent to convert Mexico,* recounts with gusto a number of such plays performed in 1538 and 1539, including the Annunciation, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the Crusaders' Capture of Jerusalem, presumably all scripted and directed by friars, but performed exclusively by Indians.41 Seven generations later the tradition was still alive: in 1714 the Tlaxcalan writer Juan Ventura Zapata wrote a somewhat more imaginative work, the Invention of the Holy Cross, which contains a scene where the Aztec G.o.d of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, confronts the Roman emperor Constantine.42 To this day, in the town of Tepoztlan, a pageant of Christian conversion is presented every year on 8 September: TLACAPAYAN: Mountain-dweller! Tlacapayan seeks you. Now I have come. I come to reduce you to earth and dust, and to earth and dust I will turn you. What do you now fear when you hear of my fame and my words? Where have you abandoned our revered G.o.ds? You have given yourself over to foreigners, those bad priests. Know what it is that Tlacapayan desires. He had never lost his vision. You will be destroyed and you will perish. And stout is my heart.

TEPOZTECO: HOW is it that right at this time, why is it that right now you have come, when I am enjoying myself, resting, rejoicing, commemorating the eternal Virgin, the Mother of G.o.d, and our precious Mother? ... Truly exalted is our precious Mother the lady Virgin as says the divine author in the book of the wise. There it is said in the holy songs that twelve stars circle her head and that with the luminous moon her feet are supported, thus over all earth and heaven it spreads forth.43 In Peru, att.i.tudes to the lengua general were more complex. Quechua, like Nahuatl, was widely used to preach the gospel, and at the same time became the vehicle for a nostalgic literature harking back to life before the conquest. But it was also taken up by the criollo landowning cla.s.s, not themselves descendants of Indians, as a symbol of local legitimacy: at once it distinguished them from the Spanish-speaking urban elite in Lima, but also denied the country people a linguistic means to keep their landlords at a distance. Nevertheless, over the two and a half centuries after the conquest, Quechua came increasingly to represent the dissatisfaction of the Peruvian peasants; this exploded into open uprisings in the last half-century, culminating in the general rebellion in 1780 under the self-styled Tupac Amaru II ('Royal Serpent'). It is said that, before the rebellion was crushed, the drama Ollantay had been staged before the leaders. This is known as the finest work of the Quechua theatre, and tells the tormented love story of an Inca princess and a warrior commoner, in the heyday of the great Incas Pachacutec and Tupac Yupanqui (mid-fifteenth century). Here is the section where the Inca, somewhat abruptly, shows the quality of his mercy.

INCA YUPANQUI: Choose your penalties. Speak, Willac Umu.

WILLAC UMU: To me the Sun gave a merciful heart.

INCA YUPANQUI: Rumi, then you must speak.

Rumi Awi: The price of the misdeed must be a cruel death Inca, such is the desert of the man of the greatest sin...

INCA YUPANQUI: Have you heard the stakes being prepared? Take these rebels there! Kill these evil men!

Release the prisoners: stand up before me. You are saved from death: escape now, mountain stag. You are fallen at my feet: today the world will know The goodness of my heart. I have to raise you up A hundred times, O banished enemy. You were The Governor of Anti-suyu: and you, I witness today, If it so please me, shall reach whatever level you desire: Be Governor of Anti-suyu, and my captain for ever...*

Aymara, continuing to be spoken in the south of Peru and in what is now Bolivia (then the Audiencia of Charcas), underwent a kind of transfusion of vocabulary with Spanish: the many loans from Spanish were mostly for new Christian, or Western, ideas, but in some cases they were adapted to express traditional concepts: Wirjina (from Spanish virgen) and Santa Tira (from Spanish Santa Tierra, 'holy land') both came to stand for the Earth Mother (in Quechua Pachamama). In many other cases, Aymara words came to have Christian senses, as jucha, 'sin', in this short extract from an eighteenth-century sermon, where the Spanish borrowings are marked in bold: Kamsta, cristiano? Janiti aka isapasina kharkat.i.ta? ... P'arxtama, machaa jucha jaytama, racionaljama, chuymanixama Diosana unachapajama jakaskama : janiki animal kankaaru katuyasimti, janik sutiwisa kankaaru katuyasimti: tukuxpana machaa jucha, tukuxpana, munatanakay.

What do you say, Christian? Do you not tremble to hear this? ... Awake, put off the sin of drunkenness. As a rational being, be sensible, live in the path which G.o.d marks out. Do not make yourself an animal. Don't return to being something nameless. Make an end of the sin of drunkenness, make an end of it, beloved.44 Guarani is the only indigenous American language that ultimately achieved permanent recognition as an official national language. Partly, the low penetration of Spanish in the early years may be due to the extreme remoteness of the Guarani-speaking areas in the Americas, and the resulting lack of Spanish-speaking women to found Spanish-speaking families there. But the language mostly owes its resilience to the exemplary settlement by Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Their reducciones, communities founded as a holy and philanthropic reaction to the oppressive system of encomiendas* around Asuncion, dominated relations between European and Indian in the period 1609-1767. The work was disrupted by raiding slavers (the dreaded 'mamelucos') in 1628-40, and persistently by encomenderos. In the reducciones, all teaching was carried out in Guarani, and the language thereby gained a very strong basis in Christianised culture. The utopian nature of the world so created by the Jesuits can be seen in the literal meaning of some of the new words that became current: ibirayararusu, 'master of the big stick', i.e. chief constable; kuarepoti, 'excrement of the mines', i.e. money (something that had no use in the reducciones).,45 INKA YUPANKI: Akllaychis k' iriykichista. Willaq-Umu, qan rimariy.

WILLAQ UMU: Nuqaman ancha khuyaqtan Inti sunqota qowarqan.

INKA YUPANKI: Rumi, qanataq rimariy.

RUMI AWI: Hatun huchaman chaninqa K'iri wauypunin kanqa: Chaymi runataqa hark' anqa Huchapakunanta, Inka...

INKA YUPANKI: achu uyarirqankichisa Takarpu kamarisqata. Chayman pusay kaykunata! Awqataqa sipiychisa!... Paskaychis chay watasqata: Hatarimuy kay awk'iyman! Qespinkin wauyniykita: k.u.man phaway, luychu k' ita. an urmamunki chakiyman: Kunanmi teqsi yachanqa Sunqoypa llanp'u kasqanta. Huqariqaykin qanta, Pachak kuti awqa mink' a. Qanmi karqanki wanin' ka Anti-suyu kamachikoq: Qanllataqmi kunan rikoq, Nuqaq munayniy kaqtinqa, Chaymi maykamapas rinqa: Anti-suyuta kamachiy, Wamink' ay kapuy wiaypaq...

An explicit motive in the Jesuits' language regime was to protect Indians from European vices. But cultivation of the decent obscurity of a cla.s.sical language, specifically Latin, was a policy widely pursued by the learned friars in the Americas, not least because they were aiming to found a native priesthood there. Some of the friars became enchanted by the achievements of their pupils in cla.s.sical learning. Fray Toribio Motolinia, one of the twelve original Franciscan missionaries to Mexico, preserves this anecdote of the collapse of a stout party from Castile: A very fine thing happened to a priest recently arrived from Castile, who could not believe that the Indians knew Christian doctrine, nor the Lord's Prayer, nor the Creed; and when other Spaniards told him they did, he remained sceptical; just then two students had come out of cla.s.s, and the priest thinking they were from the rest of the Indians, asked one of them if he knew the Lord's Prayer and he said he did, and he made him say it, and then he made him say the Creed, and the student said it perfectly well; and the priest challenged one word which the Indian had got right, and since the Indian a.s.serted that he was right, and the priest denied it, the student had to ask what was the correct way, and asked him in Latin: Reverende Pater, cujus casus est? Then since the priest did not know grammar, he was left quite at a loss, covered with confusion.46 In some places, the Spanish spread the lenguas generales beyond the range of the pre-Columbian empires that had created them. Under the Spanish, and with the aid of their Nahuatl-speaking allies, notably from Tlaxcallan, who were only too happy to dispossess the Aztecs, Nahuatl spread down into Guatemala, which had hitherto been a preserve of Mayan speakers. This is why so many Guatemalan place names are actually of Nahuatl origin: the name of the beautiful Lake At.i.tlan means 'round the water', or as they put it in the local Tz'utujil, chi-nim-ya', 'by the great water'; Guatemala itself is Quauh-temal-lan, 'tree-infection-place', translating the Mayan expression k'i-chee' (still used to refer to the largest language group in the country, traditionally spelt Quiche). A common ending for town names, -tenango, is from... tenan-co, ' in the citadel of ... ' : Quetzaltenango, ' in the citadel of the quetzal bird', Huehuetenango, 'in the old citadel', Momostenango, 'in the citadel of the chapel', Chichicastenango, 'in the citadel of the bitter nettle'. These all have a decidedly foreign ring today, when Nahuatl is no longer spoken east or south of the isthmus of Tepehuantepec, 500 kilometres away. The Tlaxcalans also took their Nahuatl northward, at least to Zacatecas; and in the west, Nahuatl was used by missionaries to preach to the Tarascans of Michoacan (Nahuatl Michuahkan 'place of those who have fish'), which had never been part of the Aztec domains.47 In Peru, the evidence suggests that Quechua had already been spread, whether through the fifteenth-century conquests of Tupac Yupanqui or the travels of Chincha merchants, as far north as the borders of modern Colombia well before the Spanish conquest.48 The Incas had also established some level of economic link with the Tuc.u.man area to their south: there were roads, garrison stations and inns, and perhaps periodic labour corvees (mit' a) of the type familiar in their empire. But the linguistic impact of this is unclear. At any rate, under Spanish tutelage the language was to consolidate its spread southward. There was net migration from Peru south into the Potosi area of modern Bolivia, to support the vast development of silver mining there. Later, Quechua also spread into the provinces of Tuc.u.man, Santiago del Estero and Cordoba of modern Argentina. In all this area, Spanish inroads were accompanied by larger numbers of attendant Peruvians and mestizos; and so the linguistic advance of empire tended to be Quechua rather than Spanish. Missionary activity too was a factor, after the Council of Lima in 1582-3, which had set out a general plan for the conversion of the Americas: as everywhere, the friars found it more expeditious to preach in the lengua general, and in this period Quechua must still have had some flavour of Inca prestige attached to it.* By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tuc.u.man had lost its previous languages, and was essentially a Quechua-speaking region.49

The state's solution: Hispanizacion

The ministers of the church who do not attempt to advance and extend the Castilian language and take care that the Indians know how to read and write in it, leaving them shut up in their own language, are to my thinking the declared enemies of the natives, of their policy and rationality...

Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitron, archbishop of Mexico, 176950 In the middle of the eighteenth century, when Spain had dominated the Americas for fully ten generations, many Spaniards were disappointed in the very much less than universal spread of their language. Rosenblat estimates that in the Spanish colonies in 1810 there were three mother-tongue speakers of an indigenous language for every one who had grown up with Spanish: 9 million rural Indians to 3 million whites, creoles and mestizos.51 The archbishop of Mexico, Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitron-himself a Spaniard, naturally-took the language question particularly to heart: This is a constant truth: the maintenance of the language of the Indians is a folly [un capricho] of men, whose fortune and learning is restricted to speaking that tongue learnt even as a child: it is a contagion, which separates the Indians from the conversation of the Spaniards; it is a plague, which infects the Dogmas of our Holy Faith; it is a prejudicial marker to separate the natives of some villages from others by diversity of their tongues; it is an increased cost for the parishes, which require ministers of different languages in their same domain; and it is an impossibility for the governance of the bishops.52 In 1769, in a pastoral letter to the archdiocese of Mexico, he proposed the abolition of all indigenous languages through the compulsory use of Spanish. He was a child of his time, the era of the Enlightenment, when the universal benefits to humanity of Reason were being ever more widely appreciated, and new, radical, policies were being proposed to give them effect. Almost as important, he had the ear of the king of Spain, Carlos III. As a result, even though his proposal was rejected by the then viceroy of Mexico, who felt that all that was needed was better enforcement of the existing (two-hundred-year-old) standards for teaching Spanish, and then by the full Council of the Indies, on the even more traditional grounds that the Council of Trent (1545) clearly required the teaching of the gospel in natives' languages, the king nevertheless ordered and signed the fatal royal Cedula of 16 April 1770, whose crucial phrase runs: 'in order that at once may be achieved the extinction of the different languages used in the said domains, and the sole use of Castilian ...'

The decree noted that previous royal commandments for schools in Castilian to be established in all villages had been to little avail. But in fact its only concrete requirement was for bishops to appoint curates henceforth without any concern for their competence in languages other than Spanish. This was directed not just to Mexico, but explicitly to every part of the Spanish empire, including the Philippines.

The decree was followed up in 1782 by a second, which required civil and religious authorities to provide for the funding of masters in Castilian. This did not lead to any wide-scale improvement in the teaching of Spanish in the empire. The gains for Spanish, though real, came about by default, almost as the first royal Cedula had imagined: Indians' use of their own languages was simply wished away, as the Spanish authorities increasingly addressed them in Spanish, w.i.l.l.y-nilly. All official support for education in the indigenous languages came to be withdrawn; professorial chairs in the universities were discontinued; books written in them ceased to be published. Courts in Mexico ceased to entertain pleas written in Nahuatl. Furthermore, the same period was seeing a decline in the influence and the power of the Church within the empire, a process generally attributed to the spread of the Enlightenment in Europe, but evidenced most dramatically in the expulsion of the Jesuits from all their reducciones in South America in 1767. The Indians were losing not only the inst.i.tutional supports for their languages, but also their European protectors, the friars and priests. These trends turned out to be sufficient to bring on the decline of all the lenguas generales.

But liberal enlightenment did not stop here, with the attempt to shed Spanish vernacular light into the corners of minds supposedly darkened by indigenous mother tongues, and a growing freedom of civil society from obligations to the Church. Its next step, enforced by revolutionary wars in the early nineteenth century, was to be towards political independence for the Spanish colonies. Unsurprisingly, the forces that found continued Spanish rule most irksome were the Europeanised elites, the criollos, closest in their manners and language to the ruling cla.s.ses, but for ever subordinate to them through the accident of their birth in the Americas. Although they were happy to recruit mestizos, blacks and Indians to their cause, they were almost never prepared to see the indigenous languages as badges of authenticity for the new nations they wished to establish: rather, the criollos offered everyone an undifferentiated citizens.h.i.+p based on a common language, Spanish. The nationalist movements of Latin America found it hard to embrace local languages, seeing even the bigger languages as sources of division, rather than of a unity alien to Spain. Evidently, language outcomes have varied in the face of local conditions, too multiform even to review here; there are at least as many stories as there are Latin American nations. We must be content to look briefly at just two cases, where Spanish has competed with large surviving indigenous languages.

In Mexico, since independence in 1821, the existence of Indians has always const.i.tuted a kind of intellectual embarra.s.sment, their separate ident.i.ty acting as a standing refutation of Enlightenment egalitarianism: 'our political inst.i.tutions do not distinguish between blacks, mestizos or Indians'.53 In this respect, it is typical of most Latin American countries. In 1813, the revolutionary leader Morelos had appealed to the Mexica past to inspire his new Declaration of Independence: 'Spirits of Moctehuzoma, Cacamatzin, Cuauhtimotzin, Xicotencatl and Catzonzi, as once you celebrated the feat in which you were slaughtered by the treacherous sword of Alvarado, now celebrate the happy moment in which your sons have united to avenge the crimes and outrages committed against you ... '54 But by the Lerdo Law of 1856, communal rights of Indians to their lands were dissolved. In 1916 M. Gamio wrote in Forjando Patria ('Forging the Fatherland') that the solution to the 'Indian problem' lay in 'attracting these individuals toward the other social group which they have always considered the enemy, incorporating them, blending the two together, in short creating a coherent and h.o.m.ogeneous national race unified both in language and culture'.55 Paradoxically, in Mexico this view is characterised as 'indigenismo'; it values indigenous language and culture, but only the two major prestige groupings Nahuatl and Maya, and only as a kind of national credential of past cultural glory. Less surprisingly, it has been the intellectual background to precipitate growth in the use of Spanish since independence: if in 1810 there were 6.7 million inhabitants, 45 per cent of them Spaniards or mestizos presumably speaking Spanish,56 by 1995 there were 95.8 million, with fully 88 per cent of them first-language speakers of that language.57 In Paraguay, by contrast, and uniquely, the bilingualism early established between Spanish and Guarani has never begun to slip. It goes far back, to the earliest days of the colony, when Asuncion was known as the 'Paradise of Mahomet' because of the highly favourable proportion of Spanish men to Guarani-speaking women.58 Uniquely in the Spanish empire, the country never had, even in its one city, Asuncion, an urban elite who lived through contact with the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, rather than their own country. The isolation of the nation, cut off without a coastline or friendly neighbours, seems to have perpetuated this, even after independence. Every president of the country has been able to speak both languages. In fact, the two seem to have evolved a mutual dependency, like a stage double act, with Spanish cast as the smart, cultured brother (culto, desarrollado, or in Guarani iarandu) and Guarani the lovable but unprincipled oik (Guarango, que no tiene principios, in Guarani tavi). Guarani did yeoman service, boosting morale and secrecy, in two wars against Paraguay's neighbours in 1864 and 1932; and it has long had an a.s.sociation in people's minds with nationalism and the Colorado party, as against the unsettling free-market philosophy of the Liberals.59 Guarani has been subject to official discouragement at times (when the Liberals have been in power); but at all levels of society it has gone on being a language learnt in the home, with Spanish the language acquired characteristically at school. In the 1967 Const.i.tutional Congress, both were declared national languages, but Spanish was singled out as the official language. In 1996, of 5 million Paraguayans 95 per cent were said to be fluent in Guarani, 52 per cent indeed monolingual in it; only 2 per cent were said to be monolingual in Spanish.60 The general verdict on the penetration of Spanish into the Americas must be that it has had a narrow escape. Despite over two centuries of residence, and elite dominance, in the continent, Spanish-speaking society-constantly refreshed as it was by immigration from the Iberian peninsula-did not put down deep roots in the colonies. Until the late eighteenth century, the Spanish maintained themselves as an alien elite, with the mestizos as a growing body. They had benefited from the linguistic unification of their domains that had been achieved by their predecessors, especially the Mexica and the Incas, and used it to accelerate the economic exploitation of their conquests, and the missionary duties that they felt justified their presence. But precisely where they had enjoyed these advantages, they had not provided a universal lingua franca of their own. The case is strangely reminiscent of the Byzantine Greek domination of the Middle East. Aramaic remained the language of the people from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. And so the shock of Muslim conquest had been sufficient to blot out, within a couple of generations, all linguistic trace of a millennium of Greek rule. (See Chapter 6, 'Intimations of decline', p. 257.)

Coda: Across the Pacific

How superficial the linguistic hold of Spanish could be on Spain's colonies can be seen in the case of the Philippines, where a similar shock was delivered through defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898). We have already noted (see 'An unprecedented empire', p. 334) that this colony was in important ways unlike the Americas: it had not responded to Spanish conquest with a sudden epidemic-induced collapse of native population, and it had never attracted significant numbers of free-enterprise immigrants from Spain-or indeed any of the other Spanish colonies. As in the Americas, the local languages had been accepted as the medium for preaching the gospel; printing had started in the Philippines at much the same time as in the more advanced American colonies, Mexico and Peru: in 1593, a wood-block edition of Doctrina Cristiana, en lengua espaola y tagala, a parallel text in Spanish and Tagalog, was its first product.61 Since there were few Spanish settlers, and little serious economic development, there was small inducement for the Spanish language to be used outside official circles.

Nevertheless, there was a significant belated effort to spread knowledge of it. Carlos Ill's royal Cedula of 1770 applied just as much to the Philippines as to the Americas, and on 20 September 1794 his successor, Carlos IV, issued a supplement to it, officially making instruction in Spanish free and compulsory for all. This never overcame the lack of resources needed to make it happen. The royal decrees kept coming, however. In March 1815 compulsory primary education in Spanish was imposed. In 1860, schools were inst.i.tuted in the army: Spanish non-commissioned officers were to instruct their Philippine troops. In the nineteenth century, fairly respectable levels of school attendance were being achieved: in 1840, one child attended for every thirty-three inhabitants, a figure comparable with France in the same year: one child per thirty-eight inhabitants (and in Russia, one child per four thousand).62 But the American dispossession of the Spaniards and occupation of the Philippines in 1898 revealed how fragile was the linguistic culture that the Spaniards had succeeded in planting. The census of 1903 showed that less than 800,000 (11 per cent) of the 7.5 million population spoke Spanish. Fifteen years later, the number who spoke English had already overtaken them: 896,258 for English, as against 757,463 for Spanish. Seventy years later, in 1988, the figures from the Calendario Atlante de Agostini put the Spanish speakers at 3 per cent;63 this can be compared with the 51 per cent reported able to speak English in the 1975 census.

In the 1987 const.i.tution, for the first time Spanish was no longer listed as an official language of the country. Tagalog (recast, and actively developed as 'Pilipino' or 'Filipino') now plays that role (available to some 62 per cent of the population, according to World Almanac 1991), with English 'until otherwise provided by the law'. Spanish is now, along with Arabic, 'promoted on a voluntary and optional basis'.*

The progress of English over the p.r.o.ne figure of Spanish here cannot be separated from the general worldwide advance of English in the twentieth century, which will be examined in Chapter 12 ('The world taken by storm', p. 505). Something too must have been due to the pre-existing network of schools available to the American incomers. Contrast the Spanish, labouring for centuries to build them up from a zero base. It is also true that much greater funds were available for US overseas activities than had ever been for those of Spain.

But the situation compares ironically with the contest of English and Spanish in North America in the same period, where if anything Spanish-in its version seeded to Mexico, Central America, Cuba and Puerto Rico-is growing at the expense of English, in many big cities and much of the south-west of the USA. All these developments, however, tend to underline the true determinants of language spread: population growth and population movements. When an official language was an artificial thing, created by international elites, and spread as far as possible among local populations, it is understandable that the bigger budget should have created the bigger language. But when the population starts to grow, as the urban population of Metro Manila has, its language (Tagalog) has come to dominate the country just as its speakers have, English or no English.

And when a population starts to move towards that irresistible attractor, the US economy, as the Mexican and central Caribbean populations now are, new speaker communities will begin to crowd in, even if this means encroaching on the heartland of the most dynamic, and widely spoken, language in the world, English.

* These fantasies were a mannered outgrowth of the heroic lays of early Romance three centuries earlier, such as Chanson de Roland, in Norman French, and Poema de Mio Cid, in Castilian Spanish. Many of the recent t.i.tles are listed in ch. 6 of Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha (first half published 1605), where most of them are scheduled for burning. Enthusiasm for King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is part of the same European phenomenon. Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur was published by William Caxton at Westminster in 1485.

Linguistically, Galician was (and is) much the same as Portuguese, divided from it by the course of the River Minho, and the political fact that Portugal became independent of Castile in 1143.

A third (non-Germanic) group, the Alans, went south-west, not east, even if a popular etymology for Catalan is 'Goth-Alan'. The Vandals left their name in Andalusia, but pa.s.sed on to Tunisia, and were largely erased by the subsequent Muslim conquest.

* '... they reached an islet of the Lucayas, which was called Guanahani in the language of the Indians.' Columbus, Diario de a bordo, Friday, 12 October 1492, quoted by De las Casas (1957 [c. 1530]). Columbus had at first thought he was within the domain of the Chinese Great Khan, and then (12 November) amid 'the islands of India'. He no longer called the people he met indios after mid-December of that year, but the name had stuck (Sale 1990: 109).

'... These islands are inhabited by Canabilli, a wild, unconquered race which feeds on human flesh. I would be right to call them anthropophagi. They wage unceasing wars against gentle and timid Indians to supply flesh... ' Letter of Guillermo Coma, De insulis meridiani ... nuper inventis, on Columbus's second voyage, for Sunday, 3 November 1493.

* Columbus's world-view was informed by copious reading. We have seven of his books with his personal annotations, preserved to this day in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. They include works of Marco Polo and Pliny the Elder's Natural History, and others more fanciful. His son Fernando also gave an account of his father's reading, in chs 6 and 7 of his biography (Sale 1990: 15).

* Although the contacts over the first few centuries always involved the projection of the mariners' languages on to the peoples who received their landfalls, more recently we have seen that the new links can work in both directions, as immigrant communities from colonised countries gather in the homelands of once colonial powers, bringing their own languages with them.

* The word 'ladino', indeed, carried over from its application to Moors in Spain, was a term often used of non-Spaniards who knew Spanish, first applied to Indians but later also to African slaves.

* The people in Hispaniola, Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean islands, discovered in the previous generation, and immediately pressed into servitude by self-appointed Spanish masters, had spoken too many languages with too few speakers, and by and large died off too quickly, for a missionary effort to become established.

On the uniqueness of this, see Ostler (2004). Almost all the dictionaries are from Spanish into the alien language, not the reverse. The aim is to teach, rather than to learn: to encode a Spaniard's thought, and so pa.s.s it to the Indians, rather than to try to decode anything novel that they might have to say.

Lengua mexicana refers to the Nahuatl language, the princ.i.p.al lingua franca of the Aztec (Mexica) empire, and at first also of its successor empire, New Spain.

* Other than to misidentify some phrases in it, and apply them permanently to the lands he was 'discovering' (and of course claiming in the name of the Spanish Crown). Ekab kotoc, 'we are from Ekab', became Cabo (cape) Cotoche, its name to this day. And, if we follow Diego de Landa (Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan, ch. ii, written c.1566), ciu yetel ceh than, 'They call it land of turkeys and deer', ended up as 'Yucatan'.

* Guarani is so called for historical reasons, because the first people whom Europeans (with Sebastian Cabot in 1526-9) met who spoke this language were the Guarani of the islands in the Rio de la Plata and lower reaches of the Parana. Its own preferred name is avae'e, 'language of the men of the plain'.

* The name is a nominalisation of the verb nawati, 'to speak up'. We shall stick to the conventional spelling of this name, which is based on Spanish, and so p.r.o.nounced nawatl. There are dialects, often called Nawat and Nawal, which (as their names show) differ in the p.r.o.nunciation of this final consonant.

* The x is authentically p.r.o.nounced as English sh, and the stress falls on the i, followed by a glottal stop: Mesihko.

The dates quoted are actually specified with equivalent accuracy in the original text of the Cronica Mexicayotl. The many different peoples of central America shared an elaborate system of interlocking calendar cycles which tolerated no vagueness, even if not always compatible with one another.

* The phraseology is very similar to Motecuhzoma's formal greetings to Cortes. See Prologue and Chapter 1, 'An inward history too', p. 15. Note also that, in accord with the conceits of Aztec etiquette discussed there, the junior party, the Aztecs, represent themselves as the grandfathers.

* Quechua is basically spelt and p.r.o.nounced like Spanish, but w and k are common. Hence is ny as in canyon, and j is ch in as in loch. An apostrophe after a consonant marks a glottal catch in the voice. A major exception to Spanish convention is that q is p.r.o.nounced with the uvula at the back of the mouth, as in Arabic; and immediately before or after it i is p.r.o.nounced more like [e], and u as [o]. This is the fundamental reason why the language's name is given sometimes as 'Quechua', and sometimes as 'Quichua'. The first u is in any case just a reminiscence of Spanish spelling: the p.r.o.nunciation is more like [qecwa].

* Something of the same seems to have happened with the Mayan languages, but with less conscious collaboration with, or aping of, Spanish literary forms. The Mayans had not recently been united under indigenous leaders. Nevertheless, they did develop a literature, but it was one that largely followed the norms and content of their older traditions. It includes the heroic myths of the Popol Vuh, the elegiac and tragic dialogue with a doomed warrior (Rabinal Achi), and the Books of Chilam Balam, which are traditional almanacs. It was a form of underground resistance to Christian domination.

* Motolinia was a Nahuatl pseudonym, adopted by him because it meant 'poor'. The original name of this Franciscan friar had been Fray Toribio de Benavente.

* The encomienda was an economic inst.i.tution universal in the Spanish American colonies; it was a leasehold granted by the king, under which a designated encomendero was given full rights to exploit the labour of Indians on an estate, on condition only that the Indians received religious instruction.