• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 743 0

is more ambiguous, and hence more interesting, than is often portrayed in the accounts, usually self-congratulatory, of modern European writers. The expansion of the home language in the train of a growing imperial power was by no means assured: we have to account for the curious fact, for example, that the lingua franca of modern Indonesia is a form of Malay, and not Dutch, the language of its overlords for over two centuries; and the linguistic effects of some imperial presences, for example of France in Indochina, of Russia in Muslim Central Asia, or of Japan in Manchuria and Korea, already seem far less durable than those of others. We need to ask what aspects of a conquest have made a linguistic spread apparently permanent, as that of Portuguese in Brazil, of French in the Congo, or of Russian in Siberia. Nebrija’s glib dictum that ‘language was the companion of empire, and followed it in such a way that jointly they began, grew, flourished; and afterwards joint was the fall of both’ is in fact far too simple—in all its claims.

The attitudes to language of these imperial powers, and the degree of their belief in a link between language and culture, tended to be more self-regarding than that of the Spanish Catholic imperialists: that was a feature of their era. Catholic theology had been universal, and in no way a preserve or creation of the Spaniards whose privilege it had been to present it to the Americas. Marauding northern Europeans, by contrast, felt that they did have a particular national gift which accounted for their ability to dominate these previously ‘benighted savages’. But inevitably, since the founders of empires were practical, often hard, men, their appreciation of the role of language too was practical, even superficial. A language would spread first as a kind of lingua franca, perhaps in a quite restricted form, a pidgin, that made all kinds of concessions to the first languages of those who picked it up. A language was seen as a tool for transacting business. European languages were, and often still are, used as second languages in commerce and government, while traditional languages persisted in familiar contexts. As such, the spread of such a language is hard to see as a spread of the linguistic community from which it came.

It makes sense, therefore, to look at the spreads of all these languages as a group, comparatively, rather than to go deeply into the stories of particular languages in particular countries. In this way, we can hope that the crucial features of this global phenomenon, European imperialism, will show through. But by the same token, it is harder to convey the individual flavour of a particular language’s encounter with an alien environment.

Portuguese pioneers

Sustentava contra ele Vénus bela,

Afeiçoada à gente Lusitana,

Por quantas qualidades via nela

Da antiga táo amada sua Romana;

Nos fortes corações, na grande estrela,

Que mostraram na terra Tingitana,

E na língua, na qual quando imagina,

Com pouca corrupçáo crě que é a Latina.

Against him spoke up Venus fair

With affection for the race of Portugal

For all the qualities she saw in it

From Rome, that she so loved of old;

In their brave hearts, in the great star,

Which they showed in the land of Ceuta [their first conquest],

And in their tongue, which her imagination

Could take for a somewhat corrupted Latin.

Camões,* Os Lusíadas, i.33

The Portuguese were the first European power to project themselves, and their language, across the Atlantic and hence into the world at large. Their long coastline abuts on to little more than the open sea, and it seems to have been their fishing fleets and pirates, rather than merchants, who first took advantage of the great enabling maritime inventions which became available in the fourteenth century, the central rudder fitted to the keel, the magnetic compass, and the portolan chart, which gave pre-calculated directions from point to point. They were able to range widely in the Atlantic, and occasionally to raid infidel ports on the coasts of North Africa.