Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
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Ironically, though, it may be on just this ground that Russian may one day stage a comeback. As the nineteenth century showed, the Russian intelligentsia is capable of remarkable flights of human imagination; and as the twentieth century showed, their scientists, when given respectable financial support—even under tight, and blinkered, state control—are the equal of any in the world. Given a stable and more liberal government than it has hitherto known, Russian culture may yet grow into a form that will make Russia’s former colonies glad to cultivate it, and its language.
Our quick review of the linguistic careers of most of the European imperial powers has revealed a bewildering variety of ways in which empire can be won, exercised and lost, with and without long-term transmission of the imperialist’s language. The serious spread of Spain’s language began some two centuries after it established its empire. The Portuguese language seemed to spread round the Indian Ocean almost independently of its speakers’ progress; and ultimately, it grew strongest in Brazil, where the Portuguese had least scope for their great talent, commerce. The Dutch language, by contrast, hardly spread at all, though the Dutch themselves were far more effective, and more permanent, than the Portuguese as imperialists. French overseas conquests tended to vanish almost as quickly as they were built up; but sometimes French survived there, even under new overlords, and there was a pronounced tendency for those once exposed to the French language to want to keep in touch with it after they had expelled the conquerors. In another contrast, over five hundred years Russian spread itself in every direction from its central plain of north-east Europe, essentially until it encountered any power strong enough to resist it. Until 1992, its spread seemed irreversible. And yet, in the last decade, it has shown how few friends it made in all those centuries of stable advance.
But there is one simplistic prejudice that does seem to hold up: any foreign empire does tend to spread some language. It may not be a local language, not that of the dominant power, as Malay came to dominate the Dutch Indies; and it may not persist long after the departure of foreign control, as Russian is slipping away from Russia’s ex-colonies. But a common language is a practical necessity in a territory brought under common, external, control, and this necessity tends to foster language spread if the domination persists over time, with recruitment of local people to represent, and interface with, the foreign power in later generations.
In this sense, Nebrija was right.
Curiously ineffective—German ambitions
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
With stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain
Friedrich von Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 1801, iii.6
One major European language has been largely neglected in our pages, despite its major cultural status, and the sterling attempts to spread it round the world in the nineteenth century. This is German, none other than the language of Martin Luther, which led off the Reformation through a revolution in the printed word. (See Chapter 9, p. 326.) There is something almost accident-prone about German as a potential global language, many times disappointed.
In the opening years of the fifth century (see Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 304) its speakers overran the whole western Roman empire, from Britain to North Africa, permanently installing their leaders as hereditary monarchs in every country they took. Yet the only linguistic gain made was in England. Otherwise German remained largely restricted to its original territory in northern Europe, and in this early period even lost ground to Slavonic in the eastern parts down into the Balkans. (See Chapter 7, ‘Slavonic dawn in the Balkans’, p. 309.)* But in the tenth, and again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were large migrations of Germans eastward across the Elbe up to and beyond the modern Polish border on the Oder, turning them into predominantly German-speaking regions. German also spread into many cities in south-eastern Europe, on the lips of merchants and Jews.
Meanwhile, farther north, something much more structured and warlike was afoot. In 1226, the Teutonic knights, called in to fight the heathen, were gifted East Prussia by the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich II. They made good their ownership with the sword and the plough, and were only stopped from pressing on into Russia by the famed Aleksandr Nyevskiy in 1242.† From 1280 to 1410, their followers founded 1400 villages and ninety-three towns along the Baltic shores,66 and the German language was established from Prussia to Estonia. The German landowners succeeded in retaining their elite status for five centuries, through vicissitudes of Swedish and Russian overlordship, until the turmoil of 1917.
Meanwhile great events had shaken the German fatherland. It had sat out the Middle Ages under the alias of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’—in combination often with much of Italy, though without any loss of its German language—but when the Reformation came and the old structures disintegrated, Germany found itself vulnerable. In the seventeenth century the country was widely devastated by the Thirty Years War (1618-48), pitting Catholics against Protestants. But thereafter, although political stability and military security continued to elude them, German speakers were rewarded for their innovative seriousness—and later their Romanticism—with a golden age in science, the arts and all kinds of scholarship; and the German language and literature achieved world prominence, for the first time equalling French in international respect. The eighteenth century was the era of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven, Herder and the brothers Humboldt, Kant and Hegel, ensuring that many of the key ideas of the Enlightenment (known to Germans as die Aufklärung) were first expressed in German.
Since the breakdown of the Holy Roman Empire, German speakers in the south had remained relatively united in the kingdom of Austria (Österreich—’the easterly kingdom’), ruled by the Habsburg dynasty. But in the nineteenth century, most of the Germans’ territories to the north of this were forcibly united under the strong, avowedly militarist leadership of Prussia, billing its creation as a renewed deutsches Reich, ‘German Empire’. As a nineteenth-century European power, this new Germany naturally felt that it needed colonies abroad: in short order, it took possession of four territories in Africa—Togoland, Cameroon, Southwest Africa (Namibia) and East Africa (Tanganyika)—in the 1880s, and north-east Papua and most of the Micronesian islands in the Pacific in the 1890s. All these new subjects of the Kaiser were just beginning to receive instruction in the German language when Germany emerged defeated from the First World War; at Versailles in 1919, the German language lost all its overseas territories, their administrations being switched to French, English and (in Micronesia) Japanese.
The expansive German spirit made a dramatic and desperate last throw in 1939, briefly imposing a new and greater Reich over most of the northern and central reaches of continental Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals; but the six years of totalen Krieg, ‘total war’, which made up the full period for which it was able to maintain its grip, were too short to show whether any linguistic gains for German were in train. Germany’s style of conquest of its European neighbours was certainly not adapted to win friends or admirers; but there would probably have been post-war settlements of Germans to the east, aimed at sweeping aside speakers of Slavonic languages, and perhaps German-based Creoles may have grown up among mixed populations in a vast network of forced labour camps. As it was, the politicians’ demented push for military glory ended up almost erasing the language influence that German had achieved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1930s, serious scientists, artists and intellectuals in every field, especially German-speaking Jews, left in droves for exile abroad—especially to the USA, where they became English speakers; and in the post-war era, the still-fresh Nazi associations of German discouraged much use of it outside its home countries.
Hitler’s painfully direct Drang nach Weltherrschaft, ‘drive for world domination’, was mercifully soon defeated; but culturally, it had already proved self-defeating. It will be interesting to see whether the German language can begin to enha
nce its prestige in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century, with Germany and Austria now playing leading roles as well-established democracies, at the centre of a Europe which is, nominally at least, seeking ‘ever closer union’.
Imperial epilogue: Kōminka
Kōminka: The imperialization of subject peoples… Without this sense of profound gratitude for the limitless benevolence of the Emperor, provisional subjects cannot grasp the true meaning of what it is to be Japanese… While Kōminka as a concept may seem abstract and difficult to grasp, its fundamental principles are the same as those of the Imperial Rescript on Education; to understand one is to understand the other.
Washisu Atsuya, Recollections of Government in Taiwan, Taipei, 1943, p. 339
Ye subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear
yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; voluntarily promote common interests;
embarking on public affairs always respect the Constitution and observe the laws;
in case emergency arises, serve courageously; and thus aid the prosperity of the Imperial Throne eternal as heaven and earth.
From the Kyōiku ni kansuru Chokugo
(Imperial Rescript on Education) of 30 October 1890, displayed in all Japanese schools, beside the portrait of the emperor
We have to establish a new, European-style empire on the edge of Asia.
Inoue Kaoru, Japanese foreign minister, 188767
Japan is evidently no European power. But the motive with which it won for itself an overseas empire was of European inspiration. And viewed as a sequel to European empire-building, the brief story of this venture displays much of the causation, the methods and ultimate vanity of this type of language spread.
Japan had been a strictly isolationist state until visited in 1853 by the American Commodore Perry’s ‘Black Ships’; by 1858, it had been forced to conclude trade treaties with the major European powers. The traditional rule of the Tokugawa shogun was then unsettled in a number of violent incidents, which impressed some Japanese with the military power of the foreigners, especially the British navy. In 1868, shouting such slogans as son nō jō i, ‘honour emperor; expel barbarians’, and fu koku kyō hei, ‘rich country; strong army’,* these radicals overthrew the feudally based government that had lasted for the previous two and a half centuries, and established a new, radically Westernising, regime under the nominal supervision of the young Emperor Meiji, who had conveniently come to the throne in 1867. Expeditions were dispatched to Europe and the USA to find out how they were organised. By 1889 Japan had adopted a new constitution, with two houses of parliament (one hereditary and another elected by wealthy householders), centrally appointed prefectural governors, an army general staff directly responsible to the emperor (and hence immune from civilian control), and a national civil service, police force, banking and educational system. Within a single generation, Japan had put itself on a par with the leading Western powers, and proceeded to demonstrate its independence.
The main strategic motive for Japan’s colonial wars was Korea. Japan was taking lessons in geopolitics from the West; and Major Meckel, the German adviser to the Imperial Army, had characterised Korea as ‘a dagger thrust at the heart of Japan’, thinking of its value to a hostile power. Dispossessed samurai, the ancient class of knights who were the main losers in Japan’s modernisation, had almost drummed up an outright invasion of the country early in the 1870s. But in 1894 China was invited into Korea to help subdue a rebellion, and Japan—citing a treaty right to ensure Korea’s neutrality—came too. The Japanese started throwing their weight about, kidnapping the Korean king and queen to make their point; and Chinese resistance proved not only futile but costly. In the settlement of the war in 1895, China was forced to cede the islands of Taiwan and the Pescadores to Japan: these became Japan’s first colony.
Japan went on investing in Korea, and put increasing pressure on its government to provide for modernisation. In 1902 Japan struck an alliance with Great Britain, which was to last for twenty years. This emboldened it to resist Russian moves towards Korea, and start the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Like China, Russia found that it had seriously underestimated Japan’s military strength. The land battles (mostly in Manchuria) were bloody but inconclusive, but then Russia lost not just its Pacific, but also its Baltic, fleet. In the ensuing peace, Japan gained the Liaodong peninsula of Manchuria, with its two excellent harbours, Port Arthur and Dalian, and the southern half of Sakhalin island, called in Japanese Karafuto. Meanwhile the continuing Japanese pressure on Korea was now without competition from Russia or China: Korea buckled, becoming first a protectorate, and then, in 1910, a colony.
Japan’s aggrandisement did not stop there. It joined the Allies in the First World War, and speedily grabbed the German possessions closest to it, the city of Qingdao in north-east China, and the islands of Micronesia. At Versailles in 1919—when French first yielded diplomatically to English—Japan was compelled to quit Qingdao, but its control of the islands, henceforth called Nan’ yō Guntō, ‘South Ocean Islands’, was confirmed.
As a result of all this, during the inter-war years of the twentieth century Japan held a substantial overseas empire round the north-west Pacific: Taiwan, southern Manchuria, southern Sakhalin, all of Korea and the islands of Micronesia. Here it had between twenty-five and fifty years, one or two full generations, to impose itself and its language; and we shall now take a brief look at the results.*
The motives that had expanded the Japanese empire had some impact on the use of Japanese in the resulting territories. In these Pacific lands, the Japanese had not come to trade, nor for industrial exploitation. As a result, Japan sent few civilian settlers or residents: the newcomers were overwhelmingly soldiers and administrators. There would be relatively little interaction for daily business; most communication took the form of locals having to comply with Japanese instructions.
In the new colonies, the Japanese attitude to life was far from laissez-faire. Both Taiwan and Korea had in their different ways long been parts of China’s sphere of influence, and had their own systems of education in place; but the Japanese policy was gradually to undermine the locally run schools that had survived from the previous era, and to replace them—at local cost—with Japanese-language institutions. In Micronesia, where literacy and urban life were far more recent acquisitions, the aims were more modest, and years of schooling shorter: nevertheless, they remained aimed at basic literacy in Japanese. Although the attitudes of the Japanese to the colonial peoples increasingly emphasised their natural solidarity as fellow members of a potential ‘Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (Dai-Tō-A Kyōeiken), the effective pressure on them all to become members of the Japanese language community only heightened.
This was having its effect when the Second World War placed the whole empire in jeopardy. It is estimated that in 1942 62 per cent of the Taiwanese population could understand Japanese, and 20 per cent of the Korean.68 But when it first took control of Taiwan in 1895, Japan had elected to follow characteristic French, rather than British, advice and aim at total integration of the territory into Japan.* This policy had then been followed, essentially without debate, as the other colonies were taken. Over the early twentieth century, this counsel proved disastrous in the large developed colonies, especially in Korea: the emperor’s new subjects were never sufficiently trusted to allow them to contribute directly to policy-making in Tokyo, but they had no means to assert at least partial control of their fate locally. This became abundantly clear in the militant demonstrations by Koreans in 1919, bloodily put down by the Japanese; looking back in 1925, the Japanese analyst Aoyagi Tsunataro noted: ‘nearly all educated Koreans, even those who were fluent in Japanese—even those who had studied in Japan—rejected Japanese rule’.69
Meanwhile Micronesia, with no tradition of developed literacy to be effaced by the Japanese, was far more receptive to the new education. Moreover, its 50,000 indigenous population were rapidly joined by an equal number of Japanese settlers, arriving to grow sugar. Plantations were established in the 1920s; by the early 1930s they accounted for over 60 per cent of government revenues there. If it had not been for the Pacific war, it is probable that Micronesia would have been overwhelmingly Japanese-speaking to this day.*
However, Japan’s Imperial Plans for its Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and by implication for the spread of the Japanese language, were decisively disrupted by the political triumph of militarists, and the Pacific war into which they joyfully led Japan. Any hearts and minds that may have been won through fifty years of (relatively) peaceful colonialism were definitively lost in the terminal rampages of the Japanese army through East and South-East Asia. Although they briefly gained the whole western littoral of the Pacific Ocean, Japan ended 1945 confined to the islands it had controlled in 1868, even losing the outlying Kuriles in the north and the Ryukyus in the south. Taiwan was returned to Chinese rule, and Korea became independent. The more scarcely populated Sakhalin and Micronesia were placed under Russian and American control respectively. Nowhere in their hard-won colonies was a Japanese administration permitted to remain; and 6.5 million Japanese were repatriated to Japan. There was a forced intermission of all Japanese influence in Asia and the Pacific for a good fifteen years.