Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  In any case, the reaction of the Spanish Crown was emollient. No immediate enforcement of the Real Cédula was attempted under Carlos V. Some of the clergy in America were convinced that efforts should be made to make Spanish compulsory ‘within some adequate term’, because there was no clear, standard terminology in which to preach.39 In 1586 Felipe II commanded the viceroy of Peru to look into the matter, and take whatever measures seemed best; but in 1596 he rejected a draft Cédula which would have provided for the compulsory teaching of Spanish to Indians in New Spain, along with prohibition of any of their chiefs talking to his people in their own language, adding the personal note: ‘Consult me on this and the whole issue here.’ When on 3 July the Cédula was finally signed, it contained instead the instruction to ‘put in place schoolmasters for those who would voluntarily wish to learn the Castilian language’, but to ensure that ‘the curates should know very well the language of the Indians whom they have to instruct’.

  The result, maintained for the next two centuries, was very much the continuation of the status quo: Spanish in the cities, and increasingly in mestizo society; but elsewhere the lenguas generales were in use, and failing that other indigenous languages. The outcome in the long term seems to have depended on the prevalence of separate Indian settlements: for example, in New Granada, where these were few, the use of Chibcha gradually died out despite its recognition as an official lengua general, and Spanish replaced it. Nevertheless, even here Indian languages survived in remote areas. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Peru and Paraguay the lenguas generales flourished, in speech and in writing, even as small communities went on speaking their own languages.

  What now occurred was a process whereby the content of the Spanish world-view was conveyed through the pre-existing languages of wider currency. The Spanish were spared the trouble of teaching their own language widely, or waiting a few generations for knowledge of it to spread; instead, they acquired, and turned to their advantage, the old languages, whether these had been spread by previous ruling powers—notably the Mexica, the Inca and (to a limited extent) the Chibcha—or were simply pre-existing languages of trade and intercourse—notably Aymara in southern Peru and Bolivia, and Guaraní in Paraguay.

  The most flourishing of these in these first two centuries of Spanish rule was certainly Nahuatl. Since Spanish rule in Mexico created a ‘republic of the Indians’ separate from that of the Spaniards, and with separate courts, administrative use of the language was thriving. Moreover, there was not only a major effort by Spanish clergy to translate and publish liturgical material, supplemented as we have seen with linguistic analysis to aid in the training of Spanish learners; there was soon also a literature that recreated and retold the pre-Hispanic history of the country. This included above all the writing of history and of lyrical poetry. Besides the old genres, however, new ones were added: psalms, such as this one, composed by the Nahuatl encyclopedist, Fray Bernardo de Sahagún: ‘The precious jades that I also shape with my lips, that I also have scattered, that I have uttered, are a fitting song. Not only are all these a gift for you, beloved son, you who are a son of the holy Church; even more are your due … if you follow Christianity well as a way of life…’,40 and the auto, or religious play, which continued the Mexican dramatic tradition in the service of the Christian faith. Motolinía, one of the heroic group of twelve missionaries first sent to convert Mexico,* recounts with gusto a number of such plays performed in 1538 and 1539, including the Annunciation, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the Crusaders’ Capture of Jerusalem, presumably all scripted and directed by friars, but performed exclusively by Indians.41 Seven generations later the tradition was still alive: in 1714 the Tlaxcalan writer Juan Ventura Zapata wrote a somewhat more imaginative work, the Invention of the Holy Cross, which contains a scene where the Aztec god of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, confronts the Roman emperor Constantine.42 To this day, in the town of Tepoztlán, a pageant of Christian conversion is presented every year on 8 September:

  TLACAPAYAN: Mountain-dweller! Tlacapayan seeks you. Now I have come. I come to reduce you to earth and dust, and to earth and dust I will turn you. What do you now fear when you hear of my fame and my words? Where have you abandoned our revered gods? You have given yourself over to foreigners, those bad priests. Know what it is that Tlacapayan desires. He had never lost his vision. You will be destroyed and you will perish. And stout is my heart.

  TEPOZTECO: HOW is it that right at this time, why is it that right now you have come, when I am enjoying myself, resting, rejoicing, commemorating the eternal Virgin, the Mother of God, and our precious Mother? … Truly exalted is our precious Mother the lady Virgin as says the divine author in the book of the wise. There it is said in the holy songs that twelve stars circle her head and that with the luminous moon her feet are supported, thus over all earth and heaven it spreads forth.43

  In Peru, attitudes to the lengua general were more complex. Quechua, like Nahuatl, was widely used to preach the gospel, and at the same time became the vehicle for a nostalgic literature harking back to life before the conquest. But it was also taken up by the criollo landowning class, not themselves descendants of Indians, as a symbol of local legitimacy: at once it distinguished them from the Spanish-speaking urban elite in Lima, but also denied the country people a linguistic means to keep their landlords at a distance. Nevertheless, over the two and a half centuries after the conquest, Quechua came increasingly to represent the dissatisfaction of the Peruvian peasants; this exploded into open uprisings in the last half-century, culminating in the general rebellion in 1780 under the self-styled Tupac Amaru II (’Royal Serpent’). It is said that, before the rebellion was crushed, the drama Ollantay had been staged before the leaders. This is known as the finest work of the Quechua theatre, and tells the tormented love story of an Inca princess and a warrior commoner, in the heyday of the great Incas Pachacutec and Tupac Yupanqui (mid-fifteenth century). Here is the section where the Inca, somewhat abruptly, shows the quality of his mercy.

  INCA YUPANQUI: Choose your penalties. Speak, Willac Umu.

  WILLAC UMU: To me the Sun gave a merciful heart.

  INCA YUPANQUI: Rumi, then you must speak.

  Rumi ŇAwi: The price of the misdeed must be a cruel death Inca, such is the desert of the man of the greatest sin…

  INCA YUPANQUI: Have you heard the stakes being prepared? Take these rebels there! Kill these evil men!

  …

  Release the prisoners: stand up before me. You are saved from death: escape now, mountain stag. You are fallen at my feet: today the world will know The goodness of my heart. I have to raise you up A hundred times, O banished enemy. You were The Governor of Anti-suyu: and you, I witness today, If it so please me, shall reach whatever level you desire: Be Governor of Anti-suyu, and my captain for ever…*

  Aymara, continuing to be spoken in the south of Peru and in what is now Bolivia (then the Audiencia of Charcas), underwent a kind of transfusion of vocabulary with Spanish: the many loans from Spanish were mostly for new Christian, or Western, ideas, but in some cases they were adapted to express traditional concepts: Wirjina (from Spanish virgen) and Santa Tira (from Spanish Santa Tierra, ‘holy land’) both came to stand for the Earth Mother (in Quechua Pachamama). In many other cases, Aymara words came to have Christian senses, as jucha, ‘sin’, in this short extract from an eighteenth-century sermon, where the Spanish borrowings are marked in bold:

  Kamsta, cristiano? Janiti aka isapasina kharkatita? … P’arxtama, machaõa jucha jaytama, racionaljama, chuymanixama Diosana unaõchapajama jakaskama : janiki animal kankaõaru katuyasimti, janik sutiwisa kankaõaru katuyasimti: tukuxpana machaõa jucha, tukuxpana, munatanakay.

  What do you say, Christian? Do you not tremble to hear this? … Awake, put off the sin of drunkenness. As a rational being, be sensible, live in the path which God marks out. Do not make yourself an animal. Don’t return to being something nameless. Make an end of the sin of drunkenness, make an end of it, beloved.44

&
nbsp; Guaraní is the only indigenous American language that ultimately achieved permanent recognition as an official national language. Partly, the low penetration of Spanish in the early years may be due to the extreme remoteness of the Guaraní-speaking areas in the Americas, and the resulting lack of Spanish-speaking women to found Spanish-speaking families there. But the language mostly owes its resilience to the exemplary settlement by Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Their reducciones, communities founded as a holy and philanthropic reaction to the oppressive system of encomiendas* around Asunción, dominated relations between European and Indian in the period 1609-1767. The work was disrupted by raiding slavers (the dreaded ’mamelucos’) in 1628-40, and persistently by encomenderos. In the reducciones, all teaching was carried out in Guaraní, and the language thereby gained a very strong basis in Christianised culture. The utopian nature of the world so created by the Jesuits can be seen in the literal meaning of some of the new words that became current: îbîrayararusú, ‘master of the big stick’, i.e. chief constable; kuarepotí, ‘excrement of the mines’, i.e. money (something that had no use in the reducciones).,45

  INKA YUPANKI: Akllaychis k’ iriykichista. Willaq-Umu, qan rimariy.

  WILLAQ UMU: Nuqaman ancha khuyaqtan Inti sunqota qowarqan.

  INKA YUPANKI: Rumi, qanõataq rimariy.

  RUMI ŇAWI: Hatun huchaman chaninqa K’iri waõuypunin kanqa: Chaymi runataqa hark’ anqa Huchapakunanta, Inka…

  INKA YUPANKI: Ňachu uyarirqankichisõa Takarpu kamarisqata. Chayman pusay kaykunata! Awqataqa sipiychisõa!… Paskaychis chay watasqata: Hatarimuy kay õawk’iyman! Qespinkin waõuyniykita: Kuman phaway, luychu k’ ita. Ňan urmamunki chakiyman: Kunanmi teqsi yachanqa Sunqoypa llanp’u kasqanta. Huqariqaykin qanta, Pachak kuti awqa mink’ a. Qanmi karqanki wanin’ ka Anti-suyu kamachikoq: Qanllataqmi kunan rikoq, Nuqaq munayniy kaqtinqa, Chaymi maykamapas rinqa: Anti-suyuta kamachiy, Wamink’ ay kapuy wiõaypaq…

  An explicit motive in the Jesuits’ language regime was to protect Indians from European vices. But cultivation of the decent obscurity of a classical language, specifically Latin, was a policy widely pursued by the learned friars in the Americas, not least because they were aiming to found a native priesthood there. Some of the friars became enchanted by the achievements of their pupils in classical learning. Fray Toribio Motolinía, one of the twelve original Franciscan missionaries to Mexico, preserves this anecdote of the collapse of a stout party from Castile:

  A very fine thing happened to a priest recently arrived from Castile, who could not believe that the Indians knew Christian doctrine, nor the Lord’s Prayer, nor the Creed; and when other Spaniards told him they did, he remained sceptical; just then two students had come out of class, and the priest thinking they were from the rest of the Indians, asked one of them if he knew the Lord’s Prayer and he said he did, and he made him say it, and then he made him say the Creed, and the student said it perfectly well; and the priest challenged one word which the Indian had got right, and since the Indian asserted that he was right, and the priest denied it, the student had to ask what was the correct way, and asked him in Latin: Reverende Pater, cujus casus est?† Then since the priest did not know grammar, he was left quite at a loss, covered with confusion.46

  In some places, the Spanish spread the lenguas generales beyond the range of the pre-Columbian empires that had created them. Under the Spanish, and with the aid of their Nahuatl-speaking allies, notably from Tlaxcallan, who were only too happy to dispossess the Aztecs, Nahuatl spread down into Guatemala, which had hitherto been a preserve of Mayan speakers. This is why so many Guatemalan place names are actually of Nahuatl origin: the name of the beautiful Lake Atitlán means ‘round the water’, or as they put it in the local Tz’utujil, chi-nim-ya’, ‘by the great water’; Guatemala itself is Quauh-temal-lan, ‘tree-infection-place’, translating the Mayan expression k’i-chee’ (still used to refer to the largest language group in the country, traditionally spelt Quiche). A common ending for town names, -tenango, is from… tenan-co, ’ in the citadel of … ’ : Quetzaltenango, ’ in the citadel of the quetzal bird’, Huehuetenango, ‘in the old citadel’, Momostenango, ‘in the citadel of the chapel’, Chichicastenango, ‘in the citadel of the bitter nettle’. These all have a decidedly foreign ring today, when Nahuatl is no longer spoken east or south of the isthmus of Tepehuantepec, 500 kilometres away. The Tlaxcalans also took their Nahuatl northward, at least to Zacatecas; and in the west, Nahuatl was used by missionaries to preach to the Tarascans of Michoacán (Nahuatl Michuahkan ‘place of those who have fish’), which had never been part of the Aztec domains.47

  In Peru, the evidence suggests that Quechua had already been spread, whether through the fifteenth-century conquests of Tupac Yupanqui or the travels of Chincha merchants, as far north as the borders of modern Colombia well before the Spanish conquest.48 The Incas had also established some level of economic link with the Tucumán area to their south: there were roads, garrison stations and inns, and perhaps periodic labour corvées (mit’ a) of the type familiar in their empire. But the linguistic impact of this is unclear. At any rate, under Spanish tutelage the language was to consolidate its spread southward. There was net migration from Peru south into the Potosí area of modern Bolivia, to support the vast development of silver mining there. Later, Quechua also spread into the provinces of Tucumán, Santiago del Estero and Córdoba of modern Argentina. In all this area, Spanish inroads were accompanied by larger numbers of attendant Peruvians and mestizos; and so the linguistic advance of empire tended to be Quechua rather than Spanish. Missionary activity too was a factor, after the Council of Lima in 1582-3, which had set out a general plan for the conversion of the Americas: as everywhere, the friars found it more expeditious to preach in the lengua general, and in this period Quechua must still have had some flavour of Inca prestige attached to it.* By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tucumán had lost its previous languages, and was essentially a Quechua-speaking region.49

  The state’s solution: Hispanización

  The ministers of the church who do not attempt to advance and extend the Castilian language and take care that the Indians know how to read and write in it, leaving them shut up in their own language, are to my thinking the declared enemies of the natives, of their policy and rationality…

  Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitrón, archbishop of Mexico, 176950

  In the middle of the eighteenth century, when Spain had dominated the Americas for fully ten generations, many Spaniards were disappointed in the very much less than universal spread of their language. Rosenblat estimates that in the Spanish colonies in 1810 there were three mother-tongue speakers of an indigenous language for every one who had grown up with Spanish: 9 million rural Indians to 3 million whites, creoles and mestizos.51 The archbishop of Mexico, Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitrón—himself a Spaniard, naturally—took the language question particularly to heart:

  This is a constant truth: the maintenance of the language of the Indians is a folly [un capricho] of men, whose fortune and learning is restricted to speaking that tongue learnt even as a child: it is a contagion, which separates the Indians from the conversation of the Spaniards; it is a plague, which infects the Dogmas of our Holy Faith; it is a prejudicial marker to separate the natives of some villages from others by diversity of their tongues; it is an increased cost for the parishes, which require ministers of different languages in their same domain; and it is an impossibility for the governance of the bishops.52

  In 1769, in a pastoral letter to the archdiocese of Mexico, he proposed the abolition of all indigenous languages through the compulsory use of Spanish. He was a child of his time, the era of the Enlightenment, when the universal benefits to humanity of Reason were being ever more widely appreciated, and new, radical, policies were being proposed to give them effect. Almost as important, he had the ear of the king of Spain, Carlos III. As a result, even though his proposal was rejected by the then viceroy of Mexico, who felt that all that was needed was bet
ter enforcement of the existing (two-hundred-year-old) standards for teaching Spanish, and then by the full Council of the Indies, on the even more traditional grounds that the Council of Trent (1545) clearly required the teaching of the gospel in natives’ languages, the king nevertheless ordered and signed the fatal royal Cédula of 16 April 1770, whose crucial phrase runs: ‘in order that at once may be achieved the extinction of the different languages used in the said domains, and the sole use of Castilian …’

  The decree noted that previous royal commandments for schools in Castilian to be established in all villages had been to little avail. But in fact its only concrete requirement was for bishops to appoint curates henceforth without any concern for their competence in languages other than Spanish. This was directed not just to Mexico, but explicitly to every part of the Spanish empire, including the Philippines.

  The decree was followed up in 1782 by a second, which required civil and religious authorities to provide for the funding of masters in Castilian. This did not lead to any wide-scale improvement in the teaching of Spanish in the empire. The gains for Spanish, though real, came about by default, almost as the first royal Cédula had imagined: Indians’ use of their own languages was simply wished away, as the Spanish authorities increasingly addressed them in Spanish, willy-nilly. All official support for education in the indigenous languages came to be withdrawn; professorial chairs in the universities were discontinued; books written in them ceased to be published. Courts in Mexico ceased to entertain pleas written in Nahuatl. Furthermore, the same period was seeing a decline in the influence and the power of the Church within the empire, a process generally attributed to the spread of the Enlightenment in Europe, but evidenced most dramatically in the expulsion of the Jesuits from all their reducciones in South America in 1767.† The Indians were losing not only the institutional supports for their languages, but also their European protectors, the friars and priests. These trends turned out to be sufficient to bring on the decline of all the lenguas generales.