Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  By 1913, French was the language of the rulers of a good third of Africa’s land area, from the Atlas mountains on the north Atlantic to the Great Lakes of the Rift Valley. It was an expansion to compare with the adventures of Alexander, or the great Muslim jihad of the seventh century: fifty years earlier, the language had not been heard in Africa outside Algeria and Senegal.

  In many ways, the French exerted themselves to be worthy of their sudden new domains, bringing roads, railways and the telegraph, scientific assaults on malaria and other tropical diseases, as well as the Christian faith, the French language, and—to a few privileged souls—an appreciation of Cartesian rationalism. They do seem to have succeeded in transmitting to their subjects a sense that the only practicable route to power and independence lay through mastery of their own skills: this kind of persuasion was one of their ideals, what they called rayonnement, ‘beaming’. Far more than other European empires, they struggled with the question of what their true interest in these subjects was: exploitation, assimilation, evangelisation, education or simple political association. Was it la gloire that France was seeking, or sa mission civilisatrice? Taking their own culture so seriously, the French could not see these domains as anything other than parts of France: la civilisation française was indivisible. Everywhere French was used for administration, and instituted as the language of instruction in secondary and higher education, even where—as in Indo-China and North Africa—there was an ancient tradition of literacy in some other language.* Colonials could in most places aspire to full French citizenship.

  But, except in Algeria—where the native, Muslim, population were far less ready to see their Christian conquerors as role models—the French were always too thin on the ground truly to propagate their own society. There were few solid economic reasons to bring them out to these countries, or to keep them there, and rather soon it showed. In contrast to what happened in the other European empires, the typical Frenchman abroad remained a military man, a doctor, a missionary or a teacher. Napoleon, the pre-eminent French soldier, had famously slighted England as ’une nation de petits commerαants’—a nation of shopkeepers—but it was precisely the lack of such people in the French colonies which demonstrated how unstable they were. Unlike Portuguese, Spanish, British or even Dutch possessions, there was no part of the French empire which attracted mass immigration. And the French government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not able or willing, as it had been in the seventeenth, to finance any emigration. Consequently, French remained, everywhere but Algeria, a language of the governing elite, even while—at least in black Africa—the rest of the population might be heartily aspiring to its values.

  The number of colonies under French-speaking administration grew after the end of the First World War, when the German and Ottoman possessions were parcelled out. Cameroon and Togo came to France, and Rwanda and Burundi to Belgium. Syria and Lebanon were also placed under a French mandate. But almost all were granted independence in the fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The Near Eastern Arab countries were established as independent republics as part of the immediate post-war settlement. Indo-China and North Africa, as well as Madagascar and the Comoros, had to win their freedom by force of arms; in sub-Saharan Africa, by and large they were granted it at their earnest entreaty in 1960. The tiny nations of the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America are still, in effect, part of the empire: but they are now part of the French Union: according to the constitution adopted by the referendum of 27 October 1946,

  la France forme avec les peuples d’ outre-mer une Union fondée sur l’ égalité des droits et des devoirs, sans distinction de race ni de religion.

  France forms with the overseas peoples a Union founded on equality of rights and duties, without distinction of race nor religion.

  And all its members as ressortissants (i.e. when they come to France) are French citizens. It is noticeable that language is not included as an aspect in which the Union is free from distinction: that is because in the Union, everyone’s language is expected to be French.

  In conformity with its explicit respect for clarity and reason, the French-language community seeks to order itself, and have an overall conception of itself, apparently far more than any other. So it is characteritic that it has given itself an international political, technical and cultural organisation, known as la francophonie. It is a matter of some satisfaction to the French government that the initiative for this came not from France but from a number of distinguished second-language speakers. Still, there may perhaps have been a certain political motivation: the founders were President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, President Léopold Senghor of Senegal, Charles Hélou of Lebanon, and Hamani Diori of Niger. Nevertheless, France does provide up to two-thirds of the organisation’s budget. It was founded on 20 March 1970 at Niamey in Niger, central Africa, and has held summit meetings regularly, with cabinet ministers in attendance, the ninth at Beirut in 2002. Membership is not restricted to former colonies of France; indeed, Egypt recently provided the secretary-general, Boutros Boutros Ghali: characteristically it chooses to emphasise some conceptual or moral, rather than historic, relatedness.

  Its current emphasis, rather surprisingly, is on protecting and enabling cultural diversity, certainly a novelty as a francophone preoccupation, and not without a whiff of l’ esprit malin, Gallic mischief, directed at the perennial rivals, les anglo-saxons. But it is well within the tradition of incisive, and sometimes disinterested, consideration of the rights of man. Political interests will out, however, and it has been difficult for the French state, in recent years, even to protect and foster such linguistic diversity as remains within its own domains. The action of the minister of education in 2002, for example, aimed at incorporating Breton-language schools into the state system, and so funding them nationally, fell foul of an article inserted into the French constitution as late as 1992—that the language of the French Republic is French.*

  The Third Rome, and all the Russias

  †

  But to turn away from the window on Europe is hard, that is a fact. But, that being said, Asia—this could really be our exodus in our future—again I exclaim it! And if we could accomplish the mastery of that idea, even in part, oh, what a root would then be revitalized! Asia, our Asiatic Russia,—this too is our sick root, which we need not just to refresh, but utterly to resurrect and reconstruct! A principle, a new principle, a new view on the affair, here is what is necessary!

  Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Gök-Tepe: What Is Asia to Us?, 188143

  Russian, the last of the great European languages spread by an empire, is in many ways unlike the others.

  Its domain was extended not by seaborne expeditions but overwhelmingly by military campaigns overland; hence it has come to occupy areas in a vast contiguous swath to the south and east from its homeland in the north European plain. Its bounds were expanded for the most part not by traders or missionaries, but by semi-nomadic Cossacks, explorers and military men: not out of enterprise, or a duty to win souls for Christ, but for reasons of rapine, and to buttress the global interests of its state. Russia began its conscious existence with no natural defences against the Turkic-speaking Tatars to its south, and it remained without natural defences against its Slavic-speaking cousins in Poland to the west. It was on the periphery of the cultural area with which it identified, Christian Europe; but it occupied a plain that was easily accessible to horse invaders, and also crossed by a network of navigable rivers. Ice denied it access to the open sea for most of the year. Its only natural defences lay in the severity of its winters, the sheer stickiness of its land in spring and autumn, and the vast distances that its enemies would need to cross in order to penetrate it. Conditions favoured the growth and consolidation of a single large power, with defence in depth: that power we call Russia.

  Nevertheless, there were points of similarity with the other successful empire-builders of Europe. There had be
en a commercial motive for the expansion eastward into Siberia, the drive of outdoorsmen to trap animals for their fur, just as the French, and later the British, were to do in the northern wilderness of Canada. The Russian Orthodox Church was for most of the last millennium a potent symbol of Russian identity,* which accompanied the advance of Russia’s forces across south-eastern Europe and north and central Asia to the Pacific Ocean. Since its language was pointedly an antiquated form of Russia’s own, this resembles above all the imperial practice of the Church of England. And just like the British and the French in the nineteenth century, the Russian government consciously planned the later, stages of its global expansion. Central Asia, specifically the ‘Silk Road’ area of Turkestan south of the Aral Sea, was invaded in 1871-81 to protect the southern border, and as a prime source of cotton. Above all, the long-term spread of the Russian language within these vastly expanded borders was guaranteed by a flow of Russian-speaking immigrants out of the north-east into the newly Russian territories: after the 1861 abolition of the serfdom that had tied them to the land, half a million sought better fortunes eastward into Siberia in the rest of the nineteenth century.†

  The origins of Russian

  The eastern Slavs who founded Russia were among the descendants of the Veneti who, as we have seen (see Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 304), populated the shores of the Baltic in the early first millennium AD; a large number of them had not travelled southward to populate the Balkans and invade Greece (see Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 257), but had rather settled towards the east, in uneasy rivalry with Baltic tribes to their north-west, and the Uralian tribes, among them the Finns, to the northeast. Indeed, the claim is made that the majority of the original population of Rus were of Finnish descent and hence language. The Slavs would have settled among them in the first centuries of the second millennium.

  These people spoke a language that was related to that of their German neighbours to the west, and that of their Baltic neighbours (Latvians, Lithuanians and Prussians) to the north, but noticeably softer in its tone, in that consonants were palatalised and often affricated before e and i:* as a result, the sounds š, c and ž are highly prevalent; compare the middle of the Lord’s Prayer in the oldest forms of their languages:

  [note * on next page]

  The eastern Slavs, whose language would go on to form modern Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian, almost close enough in form to be considered dialects, had been farmers rather than nomads, although the quest for furs was always a priority on their eastern frontier. By the end of the first millennium they were established in a vast forested area which ran from the Baltic coast near Novgorod due south to Kiev, and out to the east as far as Kazan. Although the people spoke Russian, their aristocracy was made up of Vikings (known as varyági or Varangians), seafarers who had invaded along the waterways from the Baltic, and who at first would have been Norse-speaking, but like so many Germanic conquerors had given up their own language. They organised the Russians on the basis of capitals ever farther south, in Novgorod, Smolensk and, in 882, in Kiev. The Dvina and Volkhov were linked by portages with the Dnieper, and so communications were established with the Black Sea, and thence the Byzantine empire. In 988 this link resulted in the conversion of Vladímir (’conquer the world’) and his Kievan court to Orthodox Christianity. In the following four centuries, the religion spread to cover the full range of eastern Slavs.

  To the south of the Kievan domain was grassy steppe, dominated in the second half of the first millennium by a series of largely Turkic-speaking nomadic peoples on horseback, who kept arriving from the east, conquering and settling down as the new masters: Avars, Khazars, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, Kipchak-Polovtsians, Alans, and finally Genghis Khan’s Mongols. There was persistent warfare over the period, immortalised in the first surviving work of Russian literature, Slovo o Polku Igoreve, the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, set in 1054 and apparently written in the twelfth century:

  Uže, knyaže, tuga umi polonila;

  se bo dva sokola slėtėsta su otnya stola zlata

  poiskati grada Timutorokanya,

  a lyubo ispiti šelomomi Donu.

  Uže sokoloma krilitsa pripėšali poganïxu sablyami,

  a samayu oputaša vu putinï želėznï…

  O Prince, grief has now taken your mind captive;

  for two falcons have flown from their father’s golden throne

  to gain the city of Tmutorokan,*

  or else to drink of the Don from their helmets.

  The falcons’ wings have now been clipped by the sabres of infidels,

  and they themselves are fettered in fetters of iron…

  At last the Mongols, constituted as the khanate of the Golden Horde, sacked Kiev and ended that city’s hegemony of the Russians in 1240. Mongol suzerainty, entailing a heavy burden in tribute, came to be recognised all over the Russian territories, even in 1242 by Prince Alexander Nyevskiy up north in Novgorod, despite his recent victories over the Swedes and the Teutonic knights. It has been reckoned that this early subjection, which lasted for almost three centuries, and was definitively ended only by the victories of Ivan IV Groznïy (’the Terrible’), planted a lasting pessimism in the Russian soul, establishing a deep-seated tradition of serfdom at the bottom of society, and absolutism at the top.

  The new Russian polity, when it came, would be based not on Kiev but on Moscow, 800 kilometres (by Russian measure, 750 vërst) to the north-east. In 1328 the Orthodox Metropolitan moved his seat accordingly. Moscow had a good central position within Rus, and its triumph over the other city-states was partly due to the fact that it stayed unified, having the luck to produce a single male heir in each generation in the fourteenth century. The Grand Prince of Moscow, Dmitriy Donskoy, defeated the Mongols in 1380, and in 1480 Ivan III finally repudiated their suzerainty. The Moscow princes (knyazi) were going up in the world: about the same time, Ivan married Sophía Palaiológou, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor (deposed in 1453), and claimed to have inherited imperial status through a special donation of insignia from Constantinos Monómakhos (Byzantine emperor) to Vladimir Monomakh (Prince of Kiev) in the eleventh century. Moscow began to be represented as the Third Rome, and the monk Filofey of Pskov wrote to Ivan III at the end of the fifteenth century: ‘Thou art the sole Emperor of all the Christians in the whole universe…For two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there shall be no fourth.’44

  In 1547, Ivan IV was the first ruler to be crowned not prince but Tsary, that is to say (in Russian pronunciation) Caesar.* He went on to prove he deserved it by conquering and incorporating both the major remnants of the Golden Horde, the Turkic khanates of Kazan (in 1552) and Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea (in 1556). The local nobility were absorbed into the Russian, and so a process of assimilation was begun. With these steps, Russians began their career of imposing themselves on other language communities, an imperial expansion of their language zone which would continue for the next three and a half centuries, and end up in the twentieth century with nominal coverage of the whole northern half of the land-mass of Asia.

  Russian east then west

  The greater part of this spread came about without the active initiative of the Tsar, his government or his armies. The immediate effect of the conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan was to remove the barrier to Russian penetration out towards the east; and this opportunity was soon taken up. The Stroganov family happened to hold the monopoly of fur-trading and salt-mining: they now engaged an army of Cossacks from the Don area, initially to protect against the khan of western Siberia, but then to attack the khan’s capital on the lower Irtysh. The capital fell in 1582. Over the next fifty-seven years the Cossacks advanced rapidly and consistently, and in 1639 they reached the Pacific, founding the city of Okhotsk in 1648. They proceeded to move south down the coast to the Amur river, but were soon compelled by the Chinese to give up the area bordering Manchuria; the Sino-Russian border was defined, effectively for two cent
uries to come, at the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.

  Although their name is Turkic,† the Cossacks spoke Russian. They were a large but miscellaneous group of horsemen, militant Christians, disorderly but proud, who had taken up nomadic ways in the long centuries of threat and domination by Turkic nomads, and were found all over the southern steppe country from Poland and Ukraine through to Kazakhstan. During their advance across Siberia, they built fortresses at the major river crossings, some of them now major cities (among them Tomsk in 1604, Krasnoyarsk in 1628, Yakutsk in 1632); but they only scantily settled the lands through which they advanced. They were followed by a dusting of soldiers, missionaries, tax-collectors (exacting the tribute, called by the Turkic name yasak, that was paid in fur pelts) and a very few Russian settlers, either peasants looking for land, or political exiles sent by the government; but the linguistic impact was at first thin. The Russians remained congregated along the major rivers, surrounded at first by a diversity of ancient Siberian peoples. Over the next three centuries, as extractive industries began to develop, they were joined by more settlers from the west.

  This early expansion to occupy Siberia, taken together with the Russian heartland in the north European plain, accounts for most of the area that is now part of Russia. The non-Russian populations there were always too sparse, and too remote from any non-Russian source of civilisation, to organise independent states.

  This was emphatically not true of Russia’s other neighbours, most of whom found themselves succumbing to Russian conquest in the four centuries of Russia’s expansion. They fall into four groups: the Slavic-language states to the west; the Baltic and Uralic-language states to the north-west; the Caucasian states to the south; and the central Asian states to the south-east. As it happens, at the time of writing in the early twenty-first century, most of them have regained their independence, and are seeking to rebuild links with their pre-Russian pasts; the few that have not, notably the Chechens and Ingush of the Caucasus, are seeking more or less bloodily to secede. It is a notable fact about Russia’s old colonies that very few of them value highly the historic links symbolised by use of the Russian language, or indeed the potential for collaboration that Russian would give them if accepted as a lingua franca. It is worth enquiring why, alone of the European imperial languages, Russian has left this rather poisoned inheritance.