Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  The Inca story began far to the south, on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca, where a group speaking the Puquina [pukína] language had established a major centre now known as Tiahuanaco. It seems that in the first millennium, in concert with speakers of Jaqi [háki], another language to the north (the ancestor of modern Aymara, still spoken in Bolivia), they developed an inland trading zone to the north and west; this trade would have spread knowledge of the Aymara language, and its sisters Kawki and Jaqaru (which still survive vestigially south-east of Lima), over much of the area of southern Peru. It is visible in the archaeological record in a distinctive style of pottery, depicting a face surrounded by rays or serpents, which could be the creator god Viracocha. It is, in fact, still possible to find place names that stem from this period, for example Cajamarca itself (Jaqi q’aja marka, ‘town in the valley’).

  The Tiahuanaco rulers, apparently finding their old home threatened by mud slides, then moved across or round Lake Titicaca, to set up a new base of command in Cuzco: this began the ascent of the Inca, immortalised in their mythology as the career of their first king, Manco Capac, who emerged from the lake, bearing a golden sceptre that would show where they should settle. (Only at Cuzco could it be plunged straight into the ground.) He came with his wife Mama Ocllo, and together (but respectively) they taught men and women the arts of civilisation. At this point, the Incas accepted Aymara de facto as the language of their kingdom, preserving Puquina as an elite language for court use. (Of course, it continued to be used by their ‘poor relations’, left behind south of Lake Titicaca.) Cuzco must have been a bilingual city. This situation did not change for some nine generations (from the Incas Manco Capac to Pachacutec), as the realm of the Incas was expanded east, south and finally northward.

  Then, in the time of Inca Pachacutec, serious aggression began. Expansion northward brought the Inca domains into conflict with the Chincha: but the solution found was peaceable and extremely positive. Pachacutec (already married to his own sister) offered his son, the formidable Tupac Yupanqui, in marriage to a Chincha princess, and the result was a merging of the Inca and Chincha domains. This led to a switch of imperial language, from Aymara to Quechua, presumably reflecting a judgement on which was more widespread and useful in the combined Inca and Chincha domains. For a time, Cuzco became a trilingual city. This would have been much less than a hundred years before the Spanish conquest in 1528. Cuzco Quechua, for all its political importance, was still seen as a substandard variety, which interpreters from the north liked to look down on. The new language was then projected with the sudden, and extremely warlike, advances of the empire which, under Tupac Yupanqui, took it northward to Quito, incorporating the significant Chimú state on the way, and southward into Chile.

  Father Blas Valera insists on the explicit language acculturation policies pursued by the Incas within their domains.

  It remains to say something of the lengua general of the natives of Peru, which although it is true that each province has its own language different from the others, there is one universal one that they call Cuzco, which in the time of the Inca kings was used from Quito to the kingdom of Chile and the kingdom of Tucuman, and now the chieftains use it and the Indians who the Spaniards hold as servants and to administer business. The Inca kings, from antiquity, as soon as they subjected any kingdom or province, would … order their vassals to learn the courtly language of Cuzco and to teach it to their children. And to make sure that this command was not vain, they would give them Indians native to Cuzco to teach them the language and the customs of the court. To whom, in such provinces and villages, they would give houses, lands and estates so that, naturalizing themselves there, they should become perpetual teachers and their children after them. And the Inca governors preferred in the offices of the state, in peace as in war, those who best spoke the lengua general. On these terms, the Incas ruled and governed their whole empire in peace and quiet, and the vassals of various nations were like brothers, because all of them spoke one language…23

  And Inca Garcilaso adds:

  Those kings also sent the heirs of the lords of the vassals to be educated at the court and reside there until they came into their inheritance, to have them well taught and to accustom themselves to the condition and customs of the Incas, treating them kindly, so that afterwards, on the strength of their past communion and familiarity they should love them and serve them with affection: they called them mítmac, because they were newcomers… This injunction made it easier for the lengua general to be learnt with more enjoyment and less effort and grief … Whenever they returned to their lands they took something they had learnt of the courtly language, and spoke it with such pride among their own people, as the language of people they felt to be divine, that they caused such envy that the rest would desire and strive to learn it … In this manner, with sweetness and ease, without the particular effort of schoolmasters, they learnt and spoke the lengua general of Cuzco in the domain of little less than 1,300 leagues’ [4,000 kilometres] extent which those kings had won.24

  To these apparently benign methods, the Incas had added the harsher one of repopulating some areas with colonies of Quechua-speaking immigrant families, also known as mitmaj, ‘transplants’. These were sent with the aim of diluting and pacifying the original population. There were ten to twelve thousand of them, settled with some finesse:25 ‘They were passed to other villages or provinces of the temper and manner of those from which they issued; because if they were from a cold country they were taken to a cold country, and from hot, to hot … They were given estates in the fields and lands for their labours and a place to make their houses.’26

  The spreads of Chibcha, Guaraní, Mapudungun

  Ňamandu Ru Ete tenondegua

  …

  Oámyvyma,

  oyvárapy mba’ ekuaágui,

  okuaararávyma

  ayvu rapytará i

  oikuaa ojeupe.

  mboapy mba’ ekuaágui,

  okuaararávyma,

  ayvu rapyta oguerojera,

  ogueroyvára Ňande Ru.

  Yvy oiko’ eÿre,

  pytŭ yma mbytére,

  mba’e jekuaa’ eÿre,

  ayvu rapytarā i oguerojera,

  ogueroyvára

  Ňamandu Ru Ete tenondegua.

  True Father Ňamandú, the First One…

  Standing up straight

  from the wisdom in his own godhead

  and in virtue of his creating wisdom

  conceived the origin of human language

  and made it form part of his own godhead.

  Before the earth existed

  amidst the primordial darkness

  before there was knowledge of things

  he created what was to be the foundation of human language

  and True First Father Ňamandú

  made it form part of his own godhead.

  Ayvu Rapyta, ‘The Foundation of Human Language’,

  Mbyá-Guaraní creation myth27

  Gradually we move away from the animals more and more. In the first times, the difference was tiny. All living beings had an Aché body, a person’s body, and behaved as such. The main likeness was the possession of javu, language.

  Aché Pyvé, ‘The Beginnings of the Aché’,

  Aché-Guaraní creation myth28

  Far less is known about the careers of the other languages that had become widespread before the advent of the Spaniards.

  The altiplano of Cundinamarca in the northern Andes was largely monolingual in the Chibcha (or Muysca) language when the Spanish arrived in 1536; the area was not politically unified at the time, however, and with at least three major centres at Tunja (Hunza) in the north, Bogotá (Muykyta) in the south, and Sogamoso (Sugamuši), a major religious centre in the northeast, there was also some difference in dialects. The conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (like Cortés, another lawyer at large) had brought interpreters with him from the coast, but, in view of the coastal languages as the
y are now (for example, Ika, Kogi), it is unlikely that they could have communicated in anything like their own language: more probably, they had some knowledge of Chibcha from traditional trade links between the mountains and the coast. Although there was already a clear social hierarchy among the Chibcha, and military organisation associated with formal campaigns among the different centres (as well as their non-Chibcha-speaking neighbours), there is no evidence that the language had been spread by any political, military or economic influence. More likely, the language had simply been established by the tribes who had settled there. And their ethnic group had clearly been there for some time: closely related languages had evolved a couple of hundred kilometres to the north-east, among the Duit (nowadays extinct), and the Tunebo (also known as Uwa), who still live, and speak their language, on the eastern slopes of the Andes.

  Even less is known about the background of Tupí-Guaraní, but the language was spoken far more widely across lowland South America; forms of it have been found as far north as Suriname, north of the Amazon, and to the west in pockets on the Brazilian and Peruvian borders of Colombia. It was spoken (as Tupinambá) all over the centre and south-east of Brazil, in eastern Bolivia (known as Chiriguano), and in Paraguay (as Guaraní). Its spread may have been linked to the progress of Mesoamerican-style farming across the continent, of maize, beans and squash, supplemented with potatoes, manioc, peanuts and chili peppers.29

  And of the Mapuche past, even less is known or can be inferred. They maintained their independence until the second half of the nineteenth century; and so Spanish contact with them came too late for any use of their language, Mapudungun, as a lengua general. The use of a single language across their extensive territory suggests that they were a single group who had taken possession of a not particularly fertile region, and were thinly spread across it.

  We must now turn to the policies pursued by the Spanish to organise their colonies linguistically. But before we do so, it is worth pointing out that there is a clear correlation between the degree of political organisation of a group with a widespread language, and the development of a literature after Spanish contact (which took advantage of the transmission of a Romanised writing system). There are substantial literatures in Nahuatl and Quechua which date from the period immediately after the conquest, often written by immediate descendants of the elite who had ruled Mexico and Peru before.* Aymara, Chibcha and Guaraní, by contrast, did not develop an indigenous written literature, even though they had each been given a written standard by missionary linguists:30 as far as we can see, literature in the languages remained confined to the productions of the Spaniards, and largely to support the process of Christianisation.

  The Church’s solution: The lenguas generales

  Your Majesty has ordered that these Indians should learn the language of Castile. That can never be, unless it were something vaguely and badly learnt: we see a Portuguese, where the language of Castile and Portugal is almost all the same, spend thirty years in Castile, and never learn it. Then are these people to learn it, when their language is so foreign to ours, with exquisite manners of speaking? It seems to me that Your Majesty should order that all the Indians learn the Mexican language, for in every village today there are many Indians who know it and learn it easily, and a very great number who confess in that language. It is an extremely elegant language, as elegant as any in the world. A grammar and dictionary of it have been written, and many parts of the Holy Scriptures have been translated into it; and collections of sermons have been made, and some friars are very great linguists in it.

  Fray Rodrigo de la Cruz to Emperor Charles V

  Mexico, letter of 4 May [March?] 155031

  We are too few to teach the language of Castile to Indians. They do not want to speak it. It would be better to make universal the Mexican language, which is widely current, and they like it, and in it there are written doctrine and sermons and a grammar and a vocabulary.

  Fray Juan de Mansilla, Comisario General, to Emperor Charles V

  Guatemala, letter of 8 September 155132

  If the Spanish with very sharp intellects and knowledge of the sciences cannot, as they claim, learn the general language of Cuzco, how can it be achieved that the uncultivated and untaught Indians can learn Castilian?

  Father Blas Valera Peru, mid-sixteenth century33

  In the papal bull of 1493 issued by Alexander VI, Inter Caetera, which formed the legal title of Spain to its colonies, and in the instructions issued to Columbus by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the conversion of the natives was enjoined as the supreme objective in building the Spanish empire in the New World. Already in 1504, Father Boyl, who had been sent out with Columbus on his second voyage, was explaining to his royal masters that the spread of the gospel was being delayed by lack of interpreters.

  Nevertheless, speedy progress was made with the Christianisation of the Caribbean, largely through Spanish. As we have seen, there was a babel of different languages in use in the Caribbean, and with no lingua franca the only alternative would have been to use each and every one of them. Cardinal Cisneros in 1516 required sacristans to teach the children of chieftains and important people to read and write, ‘and to show them how to speak Castilian Romance, and to work with all the chiefs and Indians, as far as possible, to get them to speak Castilian’.34 Twenty copies of Nebrija’s Arte de la lengua castellana were delivered to Hispaniola in 1513, sent from the governmental Casa de Contratación de Indias. The process was effective in its intermediate goal of spreading Spanish. There are many reports of native chiefs who were masters of the language, and literate in it.35 But in the slightly longer term, the real aim, a new community of Christian souls, was frustrated by the disconcerting tendency of the Indians to die off, under the extreme stress of Spanish exploitation, followed up by wholesale import of black slaves from Africa. At any rate, in a situation of catastrophic collapse of population, and no segregation of Spaniards from Indians, it is unsurprising that only the Spanish language survived.

  The spread of Spanish power to the continent created a very different situation. Partly by virtue of the campaigning fury of Father de Las Casas, partly from the sheer fact of depopulation, there was already a guilty sense of what rampant exploitation had done to the largely innocent islanders of the Caribbean, and (at least in the Church and the royal court) a determination that this should not recur. The religious orders spread out across the new colonies, and immediately endeavoured to reach the inhabitants in their own languages.

  Because of the prior activities of the Indians which we have just reviewed, they found that in many of the territories the linguistic situation was much more manageable than it had been in the Caribbean. Some languages were already widespread; and even if they were not known to the whole population, everyone knew of them, and usually found them easier to acquire than the wholly alien Spanish.

  After a generation of work in the field, a direction was issued by the royal court on 7 June 1550, to the effect that the new citizens of Spain should as soon as possible be taught the Spanish language:

  As one of the main things that we desire for the good of this land is the salvation and instruction and conversion to our Holy Catholic Faith of its natives, and that also they should adopt our policy and good customs; and so, treating of the means which could be upheld to this end, it is apparent that one of them and the most principal would be to give the order how these peoples may be taught our Castilian language, for with this knowledge, they could be more easily taught the matters of the Holy Gospel and gain all the rest which is suitable for their manner of life.36

  There was immediate resistance from the churchmen called to act on it. The nature of their arguments is clear from the quotations that head this section. Means for the propagation of the faith were already to hand, they said, and these used the languages widely spoken in the major centres of population. It seemed pointless to try to substitute Spanish. And even where there was not an appropriate and effective lengua
general, they still felt that native languages were the best for their purposes. The Archbishop of Bogotá wrote to the king on 12 February 1577:

  And to take them by the hand and gather them by good means I have arrived at the best way for it, and none that I have found will compare with preaching and declaring the Holy Gospel in their own languages. I say ‘in their own languages’, because in this Kingdom every valley or province has its own language different from the others; it is not like Peru or New Spain, where although there are different languages, they have a lengua general in use throughout the land.37

  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.