Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [301]
Likewise, in East Africa the lingua franca is Swahili. This language, of Bantu origin but transformed through trade contact with Arabic (see Chapter 3, ‘Arabic—eloquence and equality: The triumph of ‘submission”, p. 103), has some 30 million speakers in all, but only 5 million of them acquired it naturally as their first language. Nevertheless, it is the official language of Tanzania, and the most widely spoken language in neighbouring Kenya and many other countries in the area. Everywhere, it has fewer speakers than the countries’ largest languages.
For many purposes, it is less important how many there are in a linguistic community than who those people are—and how well distributed.
* The first language of African origin is in fact Egyptian Arabic, with 46 million speakers, which ranks it no higher than twenty-third. The different ‘dialects’ of Arabic, of which there are over twenty-five, offer quite solid barriers to mutual intelligibility, so they are well cast in this list as distinct languages. If they are consolidated as a single hyper-language community, united by the elite’s use of classical Arabic as a lingua franca, they would amount to something over 205 million, placing them between Bengali and Portuguese. Those who know classical Arabic number about 100 million. (The distant ancestry of Arabic, like all the Semitic languages, lies in Africa. See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 58. The next major African language is Hausa, with 39 million native and secondary speakers.)
* The first language of African origin is in fact Egyptian Arabic, with 46 million speakers, which ranks it no higher than twenty-third. The different ‘dialects’ of Arabic, of which there are over twenty-five, offer quite solid barriers to mutual intelligibility, so they are well cast in this list as distinct languages. If they are consolidated as a single hyper-language community, united by the elite’s use of classical Arabic as a lingua franca, they would amount to something over 205 million, placing them between Bengali and Portuguese. Those who know classical Arabic number about 100 million. (The distant ancestry of Arabic, like all the Semitic languages, lies in Africa. See Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 58. The next major African language is Hausa, with 39 million native and secondary speakers.)
† They are better known in the West as Shanghainese and Cantonese.
* Nevertheless, its association with Indonesia was strong enough for it to be pointedly discarded as an official language in the new state of East Timor, which has nostalgically opted instead for a return to the language of the earlier colonial power, Portuguese.
14
Looking Ahead
What is old
The most evident judgement to emerge from our global survey is that migration of peoples, the first force in history to spread languages, dominates to this day. A farmers’ migration brought Chinese south to the banks of the Yangtze Kiang and beyond; nomads’ and refugees’ migrations brought Aramaic east from Syria and down the Euphrates to Babylon; a merchants’ migration brought Punic across the Mediterranean sea from Tyre to Carthage and North Africa. Migrations organised politically as state colonies, but still attracting volunteers, seeded Latin among the Gauls of northern Italy and southern France in the second and first centuries BC, as they seeded English along the eastern shores of North America in the seventeenth AD, and along the shores of Australia in the nineteenth. Even now the quasi-spontaneous migration dynamic of Spanish speakers moving north across the Rio Grande is the greatest challenge to the complete dominance of English in the USA.
It appears that, until the interesting developments with English in India in the nineteenth century, foreign conquests led to language shift only if the conquest was followed up with substantial immigration of people who already spoke the conquerors’ language. In this sense, it is