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By Root 646 0

of economic developments at last provided a motive for large-scale immigration from Europe, and with it the spread of the Portuguese language. Ore beds with gold, emeralds, diamonds and other precious stones were found in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, principally in the southern central area henceforth called Minas Gerais, ‘General Mines’, but also inland in Baía, Goiás and Mato Grosso. The result was the world’s first gold rush, coming mostly from Portugal, and thereafter an eighteenth-century economy with government revenues founded securely on gold. When the gold ran out towards the end of that century, its place was taken by the export profits from cattle ranching, especially in sales of leather, an industry that had taken advantage of the opening up of massive grasslands in these same south and central areas.

The result was a massive, and subsequently sustained, increase in Brazil’s Portuguese-speaking population, both from immigration (including import of slaves), and from natural growth. This had comprised less than 150,000 around 1650; by 1770 they comprised over 1,500,000; and this in a period when the rest of the Americas (Spanish- and English-speaking alike) had just about doubled their numbers. In the same period, Brazil had come to provide the second and third most populous Portuguese-speaking cities in the world, Baía (Salvador) and Rio de Janeiro yielding only to Lisbon. This influx of rich and prolific immigrants from Europe, which reinforced the influx of uprooted slaves from Africa, crowded out the previous língua geral of the interior, Tupinambá, to say nothing of the tiny languages spoken by individual tribes. It was estimated in 1985 that there were no more than 155,000 Brazilians who spoke indigenous languages, approximately one for every thousand speakers of Portuguese.15

Ultimately, then, the growth of Portuguese to its present status (176 million native speakers, ranking seventh in the world, ahead of German, French and Japanese) owes almost everything to the economic development, and consequent population growth, of Brazil over the past three hundred years, and very little to its spread from Portugal as a language for colonial administration, or as a lingua franca in Asia, both of which peaked over four hundred years ago.

Dutch interlopers

Saïdjah kwam te Batavia aan. Hy verzocht een heer hem in deenst te nemen, hetgeen die heer terstond deed omdat hy Saïdjah niet verstond. Want te Batavia heeft men gaarne bedienden die nog geen maleisch spreken en dus nog niet zo bedorven zyn als anderen die langer in aanraaking waren met europese beschaving. Saïdjah leerde spoedig maleisch, maar paste braaf op…

Saïdjah came to Batavia. He asked a gentleman to take him into service, which the gentleman at once did, because he did not understand Saïdjah[’s language]. For in Batavia people liked servants who did not yet speak Malay and so were not so spoiled as the others who had been longer in contact with European civilization. Saïdjah learnt Malay quickly, but behaved well…

Multatuli, Max Havelaar (Amsterdam, 1860), ch. 17

Pelabur habis Palembang tak alah

Rations finished, Palembang not beaten

Malay proverb*

After a century of stability, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth, the Portuguese trading empire in Asia was lost almost as rapidly as it was built up. This was overwhelmingly due to the efforts of another small European power, the Dutch.* The Dutch speedily divested Portugal of the sources of its Asian incomes, and became a fixture in the East Indies for three centuries. But in our history of world languages, they have only a negative part to play. The Dutch career demonstrates that a successful European imperial power may yet leave little or no linguistic trace in its domains—further evidence, in fact, that Nebrija was wrong.

The Dutch imperial career began against the odds, almost as a commercial sideline in their war of independence from Spain, a struggle that was to last intermittently from 1568 to 1648, but which in fact, from 1588, allowed