Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [201]
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 Contratación 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 principal 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 substitute 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 Bogotá 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