Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [202]
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 Cédula 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 Cédula 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 Cédula 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 Guaraní in Paraguay.
The most flourishing 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 analysis to aid in the training of Spanish learners; there was soon also a literature that recreated and retold the pre-Hispanic history