Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [194]
Nevertheless, when the Spaniards succeeded first in contacting, and then conquering, the few great multinational states that America had already produced, they found that Nebrija’s dictum, indeed predictive theory, ‘that always language was the companion of empire’ was amply borne out in the New World. The two great ancient empires of the Americas, the Aztecs and the Incas, had spread use of their languages throughout their realms, covering most of central Mexico and the central and southern Andes down to the Pacific Ocean. Less spectacular in terms of political and social development, but still highly gratifying to Spaniards in quest of gold, the Chibchan settlements in the northern Andes (at the centre of what is now Colombia) were characterised by a widespread common language, known as Muisca. And when Spain reached the southern region of the Río de la Plata and the Gran Chaco, it found a vast area where everyone spoke Tupinambá or Guaraní,* two closely related and mutually intelligible languages. Farther south still, in the chilly and mountainous land of Araucania, the Mapuche, so warlike that they were successfully to resist Spanish takeover until the mid-nineteenth century, were also united by a common language, called Mapudungun.
These languages of wide extent were very much the exception, understood over less than 10 per cent of the territory of central and south America; but this territory was very highly populated, with perhaps as much as 40 per cent of the people. The widespread languages were to prove highly useful to an invading power, since when standardised as auxiliary languages in the new empire they could short-circuit the long and laborious process of establishing effective communications. By an amazing stroke of fortune, all but one (Tupinambá) turned out to be spoken in the parts of the continent that the Spanish were to make their own. This jumbo set of linguistic advantages may be one reason why the economic development of Spain’s empire in the Americas began at least a century sooner than those of Portugal, France or Britain. The vast support systems underlying the large-scale mining of gold in Zacatecas in Mexico, and of silver in Potosí in the Andes, would have been impossible without some common language, but the language was not in those days Spanish.
These large-scale languages had not always been so widespread. Before looking at the use the Spanish made of them, it is worth considering the processes by which these indigenous linguistic areas arose.
The spread of Nahuatl
Zan iwki nonyaz in oompoliwi šocitl ah?
Antle notleyo yez in kenmanian?
Antle nihtawka yez in tlaltikpak?
Ma nel šocitl, ma nel kwikatl!
Ken konšiwaz noyollo, yewaya?
On nen tonkizako in tlaltikpak.
Shall I just go like the flowers which were fading?
Will my glory be nothing one day?
Will my fame be nothing in the earth?
At least flowers, at least songs!
Alas, what will my heart do?
In vain do we pass this way across the earth!
Nahuatl lyric (Cantares Mexicanos, folio 10 recto, ll. 23ff.)
First in terms of magnificence, and also in population, was the realm where Nahuatl was spoken.* This language was usually known in the Spanish period as lengua mexicana, since the Aztecs, as we have seen (see Prologue), referred to themselves as Mexica, and their land as Mexico.* But this language had never been exclusive to the Aztec community. Specifically, when Cortés arrived in the valley of Mexico in 1519, Nahuatl was spoken by their neighbours in Tlaxcallan to the east also, outside the circle of the Aztecs’ vassal states, neighbours who, as it turned out, were ready to ally themselves with the Spanish against their fellow-speakers of Nahuatl. But this was just one of the last traces of a distribution of Nahuatl that pre-dated the Aztecs. In fact, there is evidence that the language’s presence in the