Empires Of The Word Part 28

Conclusions

There are four main reasons why an imperial language lives on after the dissolution of the empire that spread it.

The first is because it remains the language of the people who dissolve the empire. This can be called the creole reason. It was true of all the American colonies that fought and obtained independence from their mother countries in Europe: in every case, in the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, in Mexico, in the republics of Central and South America, and the kingdom of Brazil, the people who made the revolutions were not the indigenous people but the descendants of the European colonists, who were as attached to the metropolitan language as the mother country herself. Likewise it maintained Afrikaans in South Africa, and French in Canada and Algeria. In some sense, the settlers' language communities have continued unbroken.

The second reason is because the newly independent countries want to retain a link, of trade or culture, perhaps even of defence, with the metropolitan power. This can be called the nostalgia reason. It is part of the reason why French has hung on in sub-Saharan Africa. It is also why there is still a trace of Spanish in the Philippines, and also why East Timor, independent in 2002, opted to continue-or rather resurrect-its use of Portuguese.

The second reason is often found in alliance with a third, which can be called the unity reason. A colonial power inevitably imposes a single language on a domain, which ends up being essential to maintaining it as a coherent unit. When the power changes, the language may change too (as for example it did when Spanish replaced both Nahuatl and Quechua in different dominions of the Spanish empire). But quite likely it does not, especially where there is no new conqueror but simply the culmination of a struggle for independence. In that case, the colonial language may linger on: this is another reason for the persistence of French in so many countries of sub-Saharan Africa: it just would not be practicable to administer Cameroon in any one of its 270-plus indigenous languages. And this is, perversely, why Malay was taken up as the unifying 'Bahasa Indonesia'-by the Dutch just as much as the Indonesian government that followed them.

There is a fourth reason, the globality reason. A country may persist with an imperial language, not because it gives a link to the old colonial power, but because it provides a means to transcend it. This is very widely true of countries that maintain or adopt English in the current era; but it is just as truly the motive for the Russian elite's adoption of French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The apparent failure of the Russian language to survive strongly where its speakers' empire is no more can be viewed more clearly in the light of these four reasons.

The creole reason applies only in Siberia, since by and large it is only here that the Russian imperialists settled in large enough numbers to overwhelm the indigenous people. They are approaching this sort of concentration in Estonia and Latvia, and less so in Kazakhstan: but the power there-and hence the linguistic future-has ultimately remained with the previous inhabitants.

The need to retain nostalgic links with the Russians is not widespread in the old Soviet realms; sadly, their old subjects seem to remember little with affection from the long centuries of Russian power. But there is one exception: Belarus, whose government is actively seeking betterment through closer links with Russia, and whose enthusiasm for Russian is correspondingly strong.

By and large, the different republics can achieve substantial unity, each on its own territory, through use of its own language; there is no unity reason to persist with Russian, except in Russia itself, whose Siberian territories are by far the most multilingual in the old empire. And as we have seen, the tiny language communities there are too weak to put up substantial resistance to the unifying grip of organisation in Russian.

Finally, as to globality: sadly too for Russian, in the current age of world communications, it is very evident that the most profitable links are not to be had with the doyens of Russian culture; other lands appear to be freer, more stylish, more powerful and, above all, richer.

Ironically, though, it may be on just this ground that Russian may one day stage a comeback. As the nineteenth century showed, the Russian intelligentsia is capable of remarkable flights of human imagination; and as the twentieth century showed, their scientists, when given respectable financial support-even under tight, and blinkered, state control-are the equal of any in the world. Given a stable and more liberal government than it has. .h.i.therto known, Russian culture may yet grow into a form that will make Russia's former colonies glad to cultivate it, and its language.

Our quick review of the linguistic careers of most of the European imperial powers has revealed a bewildering variety of ways in which empire can be won, exercised and lost, with and without long-term transmission of the imperialist's language. The serious spread of Spain's language began some two centuries after it established its empire. The Portuguese language seemed to spread round the Indian Ocean almost independently of its speakers' progress; and ultimately, it grew strongest in Brazil, where the Portuguese had least scope for their great talent, commerce. The Dutch language, by contrast, hardly spread at all, though the Dutch themselves were far more effective, and more permanent, than the Portuguese as imperialists. French overseas conquests tended to vanish almost as quickly as they were built up; but sometimes French survived there, even under new overlords, and there was a p.r.o.nounced tendency for those once exposed to the French language to want to keep in touch with it after they had expelled the conquerors. In another contrast, over five hundred years Russian spread itself in every direction from its central plain of north-east Europe, essentially until it encountered any power strong enough to resist it. Until 1992, its spread seemed irreversible. And yet, in the last decade, it has shown how few friends it made in all those centuries of stable advance.

But there is one simplistic prejudice that does seem to hold up: any foreign empire does tend to spread some language. It may not be a local language, not that of the dominant power, as Malay came to dominate the Dutch Indies; and it may not persist long after the departure of foreign control, as Russian is slipping away from Russia's ex-colonies. But a common language is a practical necessity in a territory brought under common, external, control, and this necessity tends to foster language spread if the domination persists over time, with recruitment of local people to represent, and interface with, the foreign power in later generations.

In this sense, Nebrija was right.

Curiously ineffective-German ambitions

Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens.

With stupidity the G.o.ds themselves fight in vain Friedrich von Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 1801, iii.6 One major European language has been largely neglected in our pages, despite its major cultural status, and the sterling attempts to spread it round the world in the nineteenth century. This is German, none other than the language of Martin Luther, which led off the Reformation through a revolution in the printed word. (See Chapter 9, p. 326.) There is something almost accident-p.r.o.ne about German as a potential global language, many times disappointed.

In the opening years of the fifth century (see Chapter 7, 'Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances', p. 304) its speakers overran the whole western Roman empire, from Britain to North Africa, permanently installing their leaders as hereditary monarchs in every country they took. Yet the only linguistic gain made was in England. Otherwise German remained largely restricted to its original territory in northern Europe, and in this early period even lost ground to Slavonic in the eastern parts down into the Balkans. (See Chapter 7, 'Slavonic dawn in the Balkans', p. 309.)* But in the tenth, and again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were large migrations of Germans eastward across the Elbe up to and beyond the modern Polish border on the Oder, turning them into predominantly German-speaking regions. German also spread into many cities in south-eastern Europe, on the lips of merchants and Jews.

Meanwhile, farther north, something much more structured and warlike was afoot. In 1226, the Teutonic knights, called in to fight the heathen, were gifted East Prussia by the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich II. They made good their owners.h.i.+p with the sword and the plough, and were only stopped from pressing on into Russia by the famed Aleksandr Nyevskiy in 1242. From 1280 to 1410, their followers founded 1400 villages and ninety-three towns along the Baltic sh.o.r.es,66 and the German language was established from Prussia to Estonia. The German landowners succeeded in retaining their elite status for five centuries, through vicissitudes of Swedish and Russian overlords.h.i.+p, until the turmoil of 1917.

Meanwhile great events had shaken the German fatherland. It had sat out the Middle Ages under the alias of the 'Holy Roman Empire'-in combination often with much of Italy, though without any loss of its German language-but when the Reformation came and the old structures disintegrated, Germany found itself vulnerable. In the seventeenth century the country was widely devastated by the Thirty Years War (1618-48), pitting Catholics against Protestants. But thereafter, although political stability and military security continued to elude them, German speakers were rewarded for their innovative seriousness-and later their Romanticism-with a golden age in science, the arts and all kinds of scholars.h.i.+p; and the German language and literature achieved world prominence, for the first time equalling French in international respect. The eighteenth century was the era of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven, Herder and the brothers Humboldt, Kant and Hegel, ensuring that many of the key ideas of the Enlightenment (known to Germans as die Aufklarung) were first expressed in German.

Since the breakdown of the Holy Roman Empire, German speakers in the south had remained relatively united in the kingdom of Austria (osterreich-'the easterly kingdom'), ruled by the Habsburg dynasty. But in the nineteenth century, most of the Germans' territories to the north of this were forcibly united under the strong, avowedly militarist leaders.h.i.+p of Prussia, billing its creation as a renewed deutsches Reich, 'German Empire'. As a nineteenth-century European power, this new Germany naturally felt that it needed colonies abroad: in short order, it took possession of four territories in Africa-Togoland, Cameroon, Southwest Africa (Namibia) and East Africa (Tanganyika)-in the 1880s, and north-east Papua and most of the Micronesian islands in the Pacific in the 1890s. All these new subjects of the Kaiser were just beginning to receive instruction in the German language when Germany emerged defeated from the First World War; at Versailles in 1919, the German language lost all its overseas territories, their administrations being switched to French, English and (in Micronesia) j.a.panese.

The expansive German spirit made a dramatic and desperate last throw in 1939, briefly imposing a new and greater Reich over most of the northern and central reaches of continental Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals; but the six years of totalen Krieg, 'total war', which made up the full period for which it was able to maintain its grip, were too short to show whether any linguistic gains for German were in train. Germany's style of conquest of its European neighbours was certainly not adapted to win friends or admirers; but there would probably have been post-war settlements of Germans to the east, aimed at sweeping aside speakers of Slavonic languages, and perhaps German-based Creoles may have grown up among mixed populations in a vast network of forced labour camps. As it was, the politicians' demented push for military glory ended up almost erasing the language influence that German had achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1930s, serious scientists, artists and intellectuals in every field, especially German-speaking Jews, left in droves for exile abroad-especially to the USA, where they became English speakers; and in the post-war era, the still-fresh n.a.z.i a.s.sociations of German discouraged much use of it outside its home countries.

Hitler's painfully direct Drang nach Weltherrschaft, 'drive for world domination', was mercifully soon defeated; but culturally, it had already proved self-defeating. It will be interesting to see whether the German language can begin to enhance its prestige in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century, with Germany and Austria now playing leading roles as well-established democracies, at the centre of a Europe which is, nominally at least, seeking 'ever closer union'.

Imperial epilogue: Kominka

Kominka: The imperialization of subject peoples... Without this sense of profound grat.i.tude for the limitless benevolence of the Emperor, provisional subjects cannot grasp the true meaning of what it is to be j.a.panese... While Kominka as a concept may seem abstract and difficult to grasp, its fundamental principles are the same as those of the Imperial Rescript on Education; to understand one is to understand the other.

Was.h.i.+su Atsuya, Recollections of Government in Taiwan, Taipei, 1943, p. 339 Ye subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; voluntarily promote common interests; embarking on public affairs always respect the Const.i.tution and observe the laws; in case emergency arises, serve courageously; and thus aid the prosperity of the Imperial Throne eternal as heaven and earth.

From the Kyoiku ni kansuru Chokugo (Imperial Rescript on Education) of 30 October 1890, displayed in all j.a.panese schools, beside the portrait of the emperor We have to establish a new, European-style empire on the edge of Asia.

Inoue Kaoru, j.a.panese foreign minister, 188767 j.a.pan is evidently no European power. But the motive with which it won for itself an overseas empire was of European inspiration. And viewed as a sequel to European empire-building, the brief story of this venture displays much of the causation, the methods and ultimate vanity of this type of language spread.

j.a.pan had been a strictly isolationist state until visited in 1853 by the American Commodore Perry's 'Black s.h.i.+ps'; by 1858, it had been forced to conclude trade treaties with the major European powers. The traditional rule of the Tokugawa shogun was then unsettled in a number of violent incidents, which impressed some j.a.panese with the military power of the foreigners, especially the British navy. In 1868, shouting such slogans as son no jo i, 'honour emperor; expel barbarians', and fu koku kyo hei, 'rich country; strong army',* these radicals overthrew the feudally based government that had lasted for the previous two and a half centuries, and established a new, radically Westernising, regime under the nominal supervision of the young Emperor Meiji, who had conveniently come to the throne in 1867. Expeditions were dispatched to Europe and the USA to find out how they were organised. By 1889 j.a.pan had adopted a new const.i.tution, with two houses of parliament (one hereditary and another elected by wealthy householders), centrally appointed prefectural governors, an army general staff directly responsible to the emperor (and hence immune from civilian control), and a national civil service, police force, banking and educational system. Within a single generation, j.a.pan had put itself on a par with the leading Western powers, and proceeded to demonstrate its independence.

The main strategic motive for j.a.pan's colonial wars was Korea. j.a.pan was taking lessons in geopolitics from the West; and Major Meckel, the German adviser to the Imperial Army, had characterised Korea as 'a dagger thrust at the heart of j.a.pan', thinking of its value to a hostile power. Dispossessed samurai, the ancient cla.s.s of knights who were the main losers in j.a.pan's modernisation, had almost drummed up an outright invasion of the country early in the 1870s. But in 1894 China was invited into Korea to help subdue a rebellion, and j.a.pan-citing a treaty right to ensure Korea's neutrality-came too. The j.a.panese started throwing their weight about, kidnapping the Korean king and queen to make their point; and Chinese resistance proved not only futile but costly. In the settlement of the war in 1895, China was forced to cede the islands of Taiwan and the Pescadores to j.a.pan: these became j.a.pan's first colony.

j.a.pan went on investing in Korea, and put increasing pressure on its government to provide for modernisation. In 1902 j.a.pan struck an alliance with Great Britain, which was to last for twenty years. This emboldened it to resist Russian moves towards Korea, and start the Russo-j.a.panese War of 1904-5. Like China, Russia found that it had seriously underestimated j.a.pan's military strength. The land battles (mostly in Manchuria) were b.l.o.o.d.y but inconclusive, but then Russia lost not just its Pacific, but also its Baltic, fleet. In the ensuing peace, j.a.pan gained the Liaodong peninsula of Manchuria, with its two excellent harbours, Port Arthur and Dalian, and the southern half of Sakhalin island, called in j.a.panese Karafuto. Meanwhile the continuing j.a.panese pressure on Korea was now without compet.i.tion from Russia or China: Korea buckled, becoming first a protectorate, and then, in 1910, a colony.

j.a.pan's aggrandis.e.m.e.nt did not stop there. It joined the Allies in the First World War, and speedily grabbed the German possessions closest to it, the city of Qingdao in north-east China, and the islands of Micronesia. At Versailles in 1919-when French first yielded diplomatically to English-j.a.pan was compelled to quit Qingdao, but its control of the islands, henceforth called Nan' yo Gunto, 'South Ocean Islands', was confirmed.

As a result of all this, during the inter-war years of the twentieth century j.a.pan held a substantial overseas empire round the north-west Pacific: Taiwan, southern Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, all of Korea and the islands of Micronesia. Here it had between twenty-five and fifty years, one or two full generations, to impose itself and its language; and we shall now take a brief look at the results.*

The motives that had expanded the j.a.panese empire had some impact on the use of j.a.panese in the resulting territories. In these Pacific lands, the j.a.panese had not come to trade, nor for industrial exploitation. As a result, j.a.pan sent few civilian settlers or residents: the newcomers were overwhelmingly soldiers and administrators. There would be relatively little interaction for daily business; most communication took the form of locals having to comply with j.a.panese instructions.

In the new colonies, the j.a.panese att.i.tude to life was far from laissez-faire. Both Taiwan and Korea had in their different ways long been parts of China's sphere of influence, and had their own systems of education in place; but the j.a.panese policy was gradually to undermine the locally run schools that had survived from the previous era, and to replace them-at local cost-with j.a.panese-language inst.i.tutions. In Micronesia, where literacy and urban life were far more recent acquisitions, the aims were more modest, and years of schooling shorter: nevertheless, they remained aimed at basic literacy in j.a.panese. Although the att.i.tudes of the j.a.panese to the colonial peoples increasingly emphasised their natural solidarity as fellow members of a potential 'Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere' (Dai-To-A Kyoeiken), the effective pressure on them all to become members of the j.a.panese language community only heightened.

This was having its effect when the Second World War placed the whole empire in jeopardy. It is estimated that in 1942 62 per cent of the Taiwanese population could understand j.a.panese, and 20 per cent of the Korean.68 But when it first took control of Taiwan in 1895, j.a.pan had elected to follow characteristic French, rather than British, advice and aim at total integration of the territory into j.a.pan.* This policy had then been followed, essentially without debate, as the other colonies were taken. Over the early twentieth century, this counsel proved disastrous in the large developed colonies, especially in Korea: the emperor's new subjects were never sufficiently trusted to allow them to contribute directly to policy-making in Tokyo, but they had no means to a.s.sert at least partial control of their fate locally. This became abundantly clear in the militant demonstrations by Koreans in 1919, bloodily put down by the j.a.panese; looking back in 1925, the j.a.panese a.n.a.lyst Aoyagi Tsunataro noted: 'nearly all educated Koreans, even those who were fluent in j.a.panese-even those who had studied in j.a.pan-rejected j.a.panese rule'.69 It became wryly accepted among the rulers that for Koreans, 'to be educated was to be anti-j.a.panese'. A fresh rash of Korean student strikes, against j.a.panese a.s.sumed superiority, occurred in 1929-30. There was less trouble, and apparently less resentment, in Taiwan, even as their education became increasingly j.a.panese. Chinese studies were made optional there in 1922, and dropped in 1937; ironically, they continued on the curriculum-along with Korean-in the schools of Korea.

Meanwhile Micronesia, with no tradition of developed literacy to be effaced by the j.a.panese, was far more receptive to the new education. Moreover, its 50,000 indigenous population were rapidly joined by an equal number of j.a.panese settlers, arriving to grow sugar. Plantations were established in the 1920s; by the early 1930s they accounted for over 60 per cent of government revenues there. If it had not been for the Pacific war, it is probable that Micronesia would have been overwhelmingly j.a.panese-speaking to this day.*

However, j.a.pan's Imperial Plans for its Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and by implication for the spread of the j.a.panese language, were decisively disrupted by the political triumph of militarists, and the Pacific war into which they joyfully led j.a.pan. Any hearts and minds that may have been won through fifty years of (relatively) peaceful colonialism were definitively lost in the terminal rampages of the j.a.panese army through East and South-East Asia. Although they briefly gained the whole western littoral of the Pacific Ocean, j.a.pan ended 1945 confined to the islands it had controlled in 1868, even losing the outlying Kuriles in the north and the Ryukyus in the south. Taiwan was returned to Chinese rule, and Korea became independent. The more scarcely populated Sakhalin and Micronesia were placed under Russian and American control respectively. Nowhere in their hard-won colonies was a j.a.panese administration permitted to remain; and 6.5 million j.a.panese were repatriated to j.a.pan. There was a forced intermission of all j.a.panese influence in Asia and the Pacific for a good fifteen years.

What, then, remains of the j.a.panese overseas language community, half a century after j.a.pan's expulsion? Many who survive from the generations that attended j.a.panese schools can still converse in the language. But it seems that it is hardly used as a means of communication, even among this generation:70 the opprobrium that the j.a.panese had stirred up lasted so long that it prevented any advantage being taken of this heritage when j.a.panese industrial interests began to spread again. The old j.a.panese empire has in no way served as a launch-pad for the global spread of j.a.panese products, and latterly of j.a.panese culture, in the last four decades of the twentieth century.

j.a.pan's fifty years of language spread can be seen as a demonstration in miniature of the career of an imperial language. Like the other colonial empires, j.a.pan took advantage of its technical and military superiority over other countries-in this case, its close neighbours-to increase its territory. It then faced the problem of what to do with the native populations there, people who did not think of themselves as j.a.panese. It attempted everywhere to convert them into members of its own community, certainly not trusting them to a.s.sociate themselves voluntarily, but setting considerable store by education in the j.a.panese language. As everywhere else, this conversion process failed.

There was reasonable success in spreading the language, but once the political motive for using it was gone, the language turned out to have no independent staying power. The framework suggested to explain the decline of Russian can be applied here too. The creole motive was absent, since essentially the whole overseas population had been repatriated. There was no nostalgia for life under the flag of the Rising Sun, nor any wish to preserve unity with its speakers. Indeed, the bitter memories that the few years of j.a.pan's control had caused were such that even when there were globalisation reasons to renew economic links through the language, they were disregarded. Permanent language spread, it turns out, is not to be achieved through planning, or naked force.

* Cames is the doyen of Portuguese literature, and his great work celebrates the achievements of the Portuguese mariners. The name Lusiadas, although it recalls 'Iliad', is actually a learned equivalent for 'the Portuguese', meaning the progeny of Lusus, the mythical founder of the race who lived in (Roman) Lusitania. The work was actually written, for the most part, in Goa, so it is a product of Ultramar, as well as a celebration of it. It was published in 1572.

* 'Father, what has brought you to this land so far from India?' Reported in his Itinerario da india por terra, quoted in Lopes (1936: 33-5).

Now Bandar Khomeini, on the Straits of Hormuz.

* It became the default European language in the Indies, and apparently in western Java, in the region of Preanger, even Dutch was known popularly as basa Perteges-an interesting conflation of language misnomers, with basa, through Malay bahasa, from Sanskrit bhaa, and Perteges a corruption of Portugues (reported in Lopes 1936: viii).

* To compare with English dialects, Indo-Portuguese makes it like the E in a refined Scots p.r.o.nunciation of 'Edinburgh', standard Portuguese more like the a in c.o.c.kney 'mate'.

Even so, in 2000 the state's official language was declared to be Konkani, an Aryan language related to Marathi and Hindi.

* This was part of the global impact of the Enlightenment on Catholic governments (see Chapter 10, 'The state's solution: Hispanizacion', p. 374).

* Palembang in Sumatra was the princ.i.p.al city of ri Vijaya, the ancient state that was most likely responsible for the spread of Malay round the markets of the East Indies. This proverbial statement of wasted effort is said to refer to a failed Dutch attempt to take Palembang, in their day a prime source of pepper (Hamilton 1987: 60).

* Each country had between 1.25 and 1.5 million people in the seventeenth century (Boxer 1969: 114).

* The Batavi were a Germanic tribe who had lived in the area of modern Holland, north of the Scheldt, around the turn of the first centuries BC-AD. They thus provided a useful cla.s.sical pseudonym for historically minded Dutchmen, perhaps little appreciated by the Javanese among whom they settled.

A major motive was the a.s.sociation of the Portuguese with Christianity, which the j.a.panese government of Tokugawa Iemitsu was determined to stamp out within their sh.o.r.es. The Dutch, prepared to restrict their concerns to secular matters of trade, were therefore the only foreign contact of the j.a.panese for the following two centuries.

This led to a famous linguistic incident in j.a.panese history (comparable to the use of Portuguese mentioned above, ['An Asian empire', p. 388]). In 1853, when the American Commodore Perry entered the port of Uraga with his 'black s.h.i.+ps', determined to end j.a.pan's isolation, one of the first j.a.panese to come alongside, Hori Tatsunosuke, said in very good English, 'I can speak Dutch.' Since one of the Americans, a Mr Portman, also knew the language, the first sustained exchange between an American and a j.a.panese actually took place in Dutch. (Hawks 1954, pp. 48-9) * They originally stepped in to take pre-emptive control of Dutch possessions when revolutionary France occupied the Netherlands in 1795, but permanently annexed the Cape colony in 1806.

* Anderson (1991: 110) suggests two other motives: the absence of nationalism as such in the early seventeenth century (the VOC was after all a corporation, not a nationality), and Dutch lack of self-confidence in their own language. Neither seems particularly convincing, especially in comparison with the Portuguese compet.i.tors whom the Dutch were quite consciously outdoing. On p. 133, he suggests further that the Netherlands, with only one substantial colony, could afford to adopt a non-European language for administration: it would have been unworkable, he says, for a multi-continental empire such as the British. But the Dutch empire too, for its first 150 years, had been just as multi-continental.

On the other hand, he may be right in pointing (p. 110) to the language policy as a means of keeping the native population underdeveloped: 'in 1940, when the indigenous population numbered well over 70 millions, there were only 637 "natives" in college, and only 37 graduated with BAs.'

* The Italian Pigafetta, accompanying the Spanish circ.u.mnavigators in 1521, had been able to compile a list of 450 Malay words at Tidore in the Moluccas. Nevertheless, it was not yet well established there: 'even the scribes who had to write it for the infant Sultan of Tidore in 1521 and 1522 showed that they were "certainly very imperfectly acquainted with it'" (Hoffman 1979: 66-7, n. 9).

* There was always speculation that the strange unwillingness of the Dutch to share their language with their colonial subjects was a sort of sn.o.bbery, to enhance their prestige among the Dutchless natives. This was roundly discouraged by the Dutch administration as a harmful att.i.tude. Nevertheless, it was widely believed by foreign observers (e.g. Bousquet 1940: 88-9); and it did happen to fit in with a certain aspect of Javanese etiquette, whereby social status was marked by styles of language (taalsoorten).

* It might even be seen, by an unsympathetic Anglo-Saxon, as an example of 'that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit', a phrase of Peter Medawar in a review of Teilhard de Chardin's Le Phenomene humain (accessible at ).

* The term was invented by the geographer Onesime Reclus in 1880, to refer to the French-speaking community in the world. Nowadays, at least in the French-speaking world, it refers preferably to a voluntary a.s.sociation of states under a charter, not all of them ex-colonies of France, in spirit rather comparable with the British Commonwealth. (See .) These figures are from Grimes (2000). The French Foreign Ministry's francophonie website claims that there are 160 million first-language and second-language speakers. Leclerc (2000) states that 145 million people have been to school in French. Either figure might lift its rank above German, but not to the level of Portuguese.

* Je is a remnant of what was once a Latin p.r.o.noun of emphasis, ego (brutally reduced, after changing to something like eieu-cf. the Provencal equivalent, eu, ieu).

* There will be more to say of this retreat of French, from the viewpoint of the language that benefited from it, in the next chapter.

The term, and the inst.i.tution, continued in the Mediterranean until the nineteenth century, but the actual language used was based not on French but Italian, probably because of the later influence of merchants from Venice.

Eleanor (Alienor) of Aquitaine (1122-1204) played a cardinal role as a cultural sponsor. She could hardly have been better connected in society, being the wife of two kings, mother of two, and the mother-in-law of yet two more. But in the mid-twelfth century she made her court at Poitiers a centre for courtly love poetry and historical narrative.

* It has continued to enjoy the sponsors.h.i.+p of the highest level in French government ever since, broken only during the Revolution in 1793-1803. Its first task was to compile a dictionary; the first edition took almost sixty years, coming out in 1694, but it has been updated periodically ever since, the latest edition, the eighth, appearing in 1992.

* Hence the bon mot of Antoine de Rivarol, in his Discours sur l'universalite de la langue francaise, of 1784: 'Ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas francais!' ('What is not clear is not French!'), 'Eh bien, mon prince, Genes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des, de la famille Buonaparte. Non. je vous previens, que si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocites de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j' y crois)-je ne vous connais plus, vous n'etes plus mon ami, vous n'etes plus, comme vous dites.'

* In the eighteenth century, it yielded only to Spain; in the twentieth, only to Britain.

* Estimates of the French-speaking population of Algeria vary from the Ethnologue's almost absurdly low 110,000 (out of a population of 30 million) to 25 per cent of the population (i.e. 7.5 million). Many believe that it is still the second-largest francophone population in the world, ahead of Quebec with 6.7 million, and Belgium with 4 million. (These latter figures also come from the Ethnologue-Grimes 2000.) It is widely believed that the Algerian government's attempted 'arabisation' since 1962 has perversely increased use of other languages, notably Berber and French; but no survey data is available.

One village he visited near Quebec City was known as ganada, 'settlement' in the Huron language, which served as lingua franca along the river. This is the origin of the name Canada.

* The mission flourished, although it did not lead to any French settlement at the time; indeed, de Rhodes was the only Frenchman in a Jesuit team consisting of six Europeans and a j.a.panese.

However, the need to protect the missions was later used to justify the ma.s.sive French invasion of Indo-china which came in 1859. And de Rhodes himself is significant as the man who devised the script now known as Quoc-ngu (, 'National Language'), using Roman letters and accents. He had designed it as an aid to foreign missionaries learning Vietnamese. But in the late nineteenth century it was taken up, even by nationalists, as the key to ma.s.s literacy, and is now used universally in Vietnam.

* The poor Acadians were to fall victim to great power politics, their lands traded to England under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 in return for trading concessions in India. They were subsequently scattered along the coast, especially in Maine and the mouths of the Mississippi (where they became known as 'Cajuns'), some in the Antilles and many back to the maritime provinces. Wherever they went, French-speaking communities sprang up, at least for a time.

* This can hardly have been a fundamental cause, since two decades later it was French naval power which crucially denied the British access to America when they were trying to hold on to their own colonies.

The French had the satisfaction of providing Versailles as the site for the 1783 conference that divested Britain of its American colonies, just twenty years after the Paris conference when the British had taken Nouvelle-France from them.

These figures are drawn from a French source, Leclerc (2001, <). there="" is="" amazing="" discrepancy="" with="" some="" english="" figures:="" e.g.,="" mackey="" (1998)="" says="" that="" 100,000="" loyalists="" joined="" an="" existing="" population="" of="" 65,000="" french="" and="" 9000="">< p="">

* Cayenne was founded in 1643 and with Caribbean sugar aplenty had been part of Colbert's plans for systematic colonisation. It was briefly used after the French Revolution as a place of exile for political prisoners (1794-1805). It never recovered economically from France's abolition of slavery in 1848, and thereafter was famous mainly for its prison camp, Devil's Island, in operation from 1852 to 1946.

By a happy coincidence, during the reign of Napoleon III, 1852-70, the regime was even known as le second Empire.

* The Belgians, relying much more on foreign expertise to run their empire, also made less use of French as a pervasive language of administration. As in the British colonies, there was widespread use of any pre-existing lingua franca, notably Swahili and Lingala.

* Article 2 of the const.i.tution: 'la langue de la Republique est le francais'. This is then given effect by the law of 4 August 1994, 'la langue de l' enseignement est le francais' (implemented in article L. 121-3 of the Code de l'education).

In our Romanisation of Russian, y has the value of English y in yet (often attached as a superscript to a consonant, showing that it is palatalised); i represents a vowel not known in standard English: it is like the vowel i with the body of the tongue drawn back, which can be heard for instance in the Scottish p.r.o.nunciation of the word dirk; e, as in Cyrillic spelling, is p.r.o.nounced yo as in 'yob'. The acute accent, ', marks a heavy stress, and o when it is not stressed sounds more like a. In older Russian, the letter is transcribed , since it seems to have represented a more closed e sound, like E in the local p.r.o.nunciation of 'Edinburgh', or e in French ete.

* The name is a Latinisation of Rusy, first heard of in the ninth century. Its origins are obscure (and discussed in Franklin and Shepard 1996: 27-32). But the Finnish name for Swedes is Ruotsi (perhaps originally meaning 'oarsmen'); and the first recorded use of the term (as Rhos, through Greek) is the Bertinian Annals' account of a visit to a Frankish court in 839, of 'certain men who said they were called Rhos, and that their king, known as chaca.n.u.s [i.e. khagan - a Turkic t.i.tle!] had despatched them... The Emperor [Louis-he of the Strasburg Oaths; see Chapter 8]... discovered that they were Swedes by origin.' But a contemporary source, the Arabic Book of Routes and Kingdoms (c.846), tells us: 'The Rus are a tribe of Slavs. They bring furs of beavers and black foxes...' (Milner-Gulland 1997: 53-5). There is also a small river called the Rosy, which flows into the Dnieper just south of Kiev.

* The Russian for Orthodox, pravoslavnii, is a loan translation from the Greek. But tellingly, this word could as well be a.n.a.lysed to mean 'truly Slav' or indeed 'rightly glorious'.

Barraclough (1978: 209, 230). In the early twentieth century there were substantial flows into Turkestan too, sometimes provoking large-scale departures of the locals eastward into China (Hosking 1997: 389-90). Later on, especially under Stalin, these flows were augmented by deliberate enforced deportations en ma.s.se, ostensibly for security, reminiscent of Tiglath Pileser and his successors in the a.s.syrian empire (see Chapter 3, 'Akkadian-world-beating technology: A model of literacy', p. 64). But the populations then deported into Kazakhstan and Siberia typically spoke languages other than Russian: 200,000 Turkic-speaking Tatars from the Crimea, 1.8 million Germans from the Volga. Some, like the Chechen-Ingush, Kabard-Balkar and Kalmyk, were later allowed to return. But there are even now 300,000 Koreans in modern Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (Dalby 1998: 616, 223, 329; Comrie 1981: 30).

* Compare what happens to t and d in British English before long u: the words tune and dune are p.r.o.nounced [tyun] and [dyun] in careful speech, but affricated to [tsun] and [dzucar;un] in everyday p.r.o.nunciation.

* A Varangian fortress on the strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea: evidently the falcons were trying to beat a path far to the east of Kiev.