Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [209]
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 constitution, 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 prone 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 titles 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 passed on to Tunisia, and were largely erased by the subsequent Muslim