Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  All the languages whose careers we shall consider have written histories that extend back over a thousand years, and sometimes two or three times this long. In almost every case, literacy is a skill that was learnt from visitors or neighbours, and then became part of a language’s own tradition. As it happens, with the exception of Chinese, even the languages that originated writing, and so made the earliest use of it, have dropped their original system, and borrowed another,†

  The past careers of languages are as diverse as the worlds that each language has created for its speakers. They have suffered very different fates: some (like Sanskrit or Aramaic) growing to have speaker populations distributed across vast tracts, but ultimately shrinking to insignificance; others (such as the languages of the Caucasus or Papua) twinkling steadily in inaccessible refuges; others still yielding up their speakers to quite different traditions (as in so many parts of North and South America, Africa and Australia). Some (such as Egyptian and Chinese) maintained their speakers and their traditions for thousands of years in a single territory, defying all invaders; others (such as Greek and Latin) spread by military invasion, but ultimately lost ground to new invaders.

  Often enough, one tradition has piggybacked on another, ultimately supplanting it. One big language parasitises another, and in a coup de main takes over the channels built up over generations. This is a common trick as empires succeed one another, in every time and continent: Persia’s Aramaic made good use of the networks established for Lydian in seventh-century Asia Minor; in the sixteenth century, Spanish usurped the languages of the Aztecs and Incas, using them to rule in Mexico and Peru; and in the early days of British India, English and Urdu gained access to power structures built in Persian. But the timescale on which these changing fortunes have been played out is astonishingly varied: a single decade may set the pattern for a thousand years to follow, as when Alexander took over the eastern Mediterranean from the Persians; or a particular trend may assert itself little by little, mile by mile, village by village, over thousands of years: just so did Chinese percolate in East Asia.

  This means that, for all its bewildering variety, this history told through languages can give an insight into the long-term effects of sudden changes. This is true especially where what is changing is how nation shall speak unto nation, as it is today.

  In fact, the complex effects on languages when cultures come into contact is the best record we have of real influence: contrast the more familiar analyses based on military conquest or commercial dominance, which may offer a quite spurious clarity. How thoroughgoing was the Germanic tribes’ lightning conquest of the western Roman empire in the fifth century AD? Though it changed for good all the crowned heads, it left France, Spain and northern Italy still speaking variations of Latin, and they have gone on doing so to this day. What was really happening in Assyria in the seventh century BC? It was a period when the rulers’ ascendancy was assured and new conquests were being made: yet all the while its language was changing from Akkadian, the age-old language of its rulers, to Aramaic, the language of the nomads it was reputedly conquering.

  The language history of the world shows more of the true impacts of past movements and changes of peoples, beyond the heraldic claims of their largely self-appointed leaders. They reveal a subtle interweave of cultural relations with power politics and economic expediency.

  It also offers some broad hints for the future. It suggests rather strongly that no language spread is ultimately secure: even the largest languages in the twenty-first century will be subject either to the old determinants of language succession or some new ones that have arisen in the last five hundred years or the last fifty. Migrations, population growth, changing techniques of education and communication—all shift the balance of language identities across the world, while the focus of prestige and aspiration varies as the world’s economies adjust to the rise of new centres of wealth. Future situations may well be unprecedented, with potential for languages to achieve truly global use, but they will still be human. And human beings seldom stay united for long.

  An inward history too

  But we can expect the language history of the world to be revealing in another way. A language community is not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language: it is an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition. A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, clichés, judgements and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people’s view of the world must also be changing.

  So as we survey the outward history of the large and influential language communities, in their expansions and retrenchments across the face of the earth, we shall also try to show some aspects of the inward sense of the communities who spoke the languages.

  This is something that is very difficult to express, most difficult of all perhaps in the language itself. As Wittgenstein remarked, the limits of my language are the limits of my world; and these limits, he felt, could only be indicated indirectly, never stated explicitly. This book attempts in various indirect ways—and with copious use of translation—to show something of the temper of mind that was conditioned by a language, even as it gained or lost speakers.

  It is a dangerous undertaking, but it is crucial if the succession of languages which have dominated human cultures is to have more meaning than the mere list of names and dates in a chronology. It is part of the contention of this book that there is an exchange of something far more subtle than an allegiance when one generation comes to speak a language other than its parents’.

  We can get a first inkling of what that might be by comparing more for style than substance those speeches of Motecuhzoma and Cortés. Their languages, Nahuatl and Spanish, are quite distinct from one another, in ways that recall the traits of individual people. Most obviously, just as each person has a recognisable voice, each language has its own sound system or phonology. Consider the phrase ‘your city of Mexico’, in Nahuatl in mātzin in motepētzin, Mešihko, in Spanish Su ciudad de México. The phrase in Nahuatl uses a sound, tz (as in English bits), which is not used in Spanish, just as ciudad begins with a sound, θ (as in English thin), which is absent from Nahuatl. And even where Spanish was attempting to imitate Nahuatl directly, as in the name of México (pronounced MEH-shi-ko), it failed to capture the glottal stop, written with an h in Mēšihko, which probably sounded more like a word that would be spelt in modern English as Meshítko.

  But the rules of combination, to create longer words and sentences, are also radically different between the two languages. So the respect implicit in the Spanish use of Su for ‘your’ at the beginning is expressed in Nahuatl by adding tzin at the end of each of the words. In this same phrase, the Nahuatl word for ‘city’ is quite clearly a combination of a-tl, ‘water’, and tepe-tl, ‘mountain’, corresponding to nothing in Spanish, where the word ciudad has more connotations of civic status than geographical eminence. In general, Nahuatl words are mostly long sequences of short parts, often containing as much meaning as a whole sentence in Spanish: ōtikmihiyōwiltih is made up of ō-ti-k-m-ihiyōwi-ltih (past-you-it-yourself-suffer-cause), ‘you have consented to suffer it’, where the reflexive and causative bits (in fourth and final place) actually serve to show special respect, and to raise the formality of the utterance.

  But phonology, vocabulary and grammar are just the beginning of what makes languages differ. Just as each person has a distinctive manner of speaking, quite apart from a recognisable voice, there is a characteristic style of expression which goes with each language. This difference may be minimised when languages are in close proximity, and very often translated one into another, as tends to be the case, say, among the languages of western Europe. But it is always there implicitly, and stands out very clearly in the encounter of Nahuatl with Spanish.

  The most evident aspect of Nahuatl style is the constant doubling of near-synonyms: ōtikmihiyōwiltih ōtikmoziyawiltih, ‘you ha
ve suffered, you are tired’; in mopetlatzin, in mokpaltzin, ‘your mat, your throne’; ahmō zan nikočitlēwa, ahmō zan nikkočitta, ahmō zan niktēmiki, ka yē ōnimitznottili, mīštzinko ōnitlačiš, ‘I am not dreaming, not fantasising; for I have seen you, I have looked upon you.’ By contrast, the characteristic European style of reporting, where a whole speech is retailed curtly in the third person, as in the Spanish account of Cortés’s words, is something quite alien to Nahuatl: not ‘He said: “I do not know how to pay you …"’ but ‘He told him that he did not know how to pay him …’, etc.

  These are examples of the characteristic differences between languages in daily use. But then there is the area of language’s past record, in the minds of its speakers as well as in writing.

  Both Motecuhzoma and Cortés were in thrall to their verbal pasts. Cortés was soon engaged in giving an impromptu sermon, which would naturally have made little sense, since his audience lacked a knowledge of the Christian texts with which he had grown up in Catholic Spain. But the tlatoani’s speech, too, is a polished production, redolent of the wewe-tlatolli, ‘the speech of the ancients’, which was part of the curriculum at the kalmēkak, the school for Mexican elite youth. This included, for example, a speech on duty, to be delivered to a recently appointed tlatoani: ‘Our lord of greatest serenity and humanity, and our king of great generosity and valour, more precious than all precious stones, even than sapphire! Could it be a dream that we are seeing? Could we be drunk in seeing what our lord has done for us in giving us you for king and lord? And truly our lord God has set over us a new sun of great splendour and a light like the dawn’s …’3

  The same themes are here in this classic school text, of a new leader appearing as in a dream, and being like a light from the sky. But what was missing in Motecuhzoma’s greetings to Cortés was anything like the speech that always preceded this one in the ceremonies of welcome to a new tlatoani, a speech in which he would be fully reminded of his duties, and the need not to let his new eminence go to his head. Would it have seemed strange to the Aztec audience that these friendly cautions were omitted in the greetings to Cortés?

  A feature of Nahuatl style has always been the use of endearments as terms of honour: the -tzin we have seen used as an honorific is still used in modern Nahuatl as an affectionate suffix (no-kokonē-tzin, ‘my dear child’), and it has been argued that this was in fact its original sense. Certainly, the polite use of Nahuatl involves some strange reversals from our point of view: a governor at a wedding feast may be spoken to as ‘my dear child’, while the retainers at a royal court would be addressed by their lord as ‘our progenitors’. In Nahuatl etiquette, it seems that genuine respect was shown by adopting a rather daring familiarity, and perhaps the converse was also true. It has even been suggested4 that the highly reverential tone and the absence of affectionate terms in Motecuhzoma’s speech to Cortés actually show that he was demeaning the Spaniard, or at least trying to assert a distance between the two of them. If true, this was a singularly ill-judged approach. Cortés was himself a highly educated man—but he could hardly pick up on the courtly subtleties of such an alien rhetoric.

  This brief analysis has already shown that the encounter between Spanish and Nahuatl in sixteenth-century Mexico pitted two developed cultures one against another. The switch to speaking Spanish that came about in the next few generations involved a change of heart as well as tongue. So much so that the social significance in Mexico of speaking Nahuatl (also called Mexicano) rather than Spanish has lasted up to the present day. Speakers make comments like these:

  There is no way that Nahuatl could disappear because it is the inheritance from our forefathers.

  Those of us who speak Mexicano, well, it’s something that belongs to our grandparents. Let Mexicano never be lost. My grandfather and my grandmother always spoke in Nahuatl. They never used the Spanish language.

  It is important and at the same time nice to be able to speak Nahuatl because this is the authentic way of talking in Mexico. I consider it very important because we feel we are the authentic Mexicans, because Spanish was only brought here with the Conquest. From that time on people started to speak Spanish in our country. But before the Conquest our grandparents spoke Nahuatl. Obviously the Conquest brought a lot of changes. There was more civilization, and that’s why I think it is important for us also to speak Spanish. But we haven’t been able to stop speaking Nahuatl because our parents speak it and we follow them.5

  Every language defines a community, the people who speak it and can understand one another. A language acts not just as a means of communication among them but a banner of their distinct identity, often to the despair of national governments trying to forge a single identity for all their different language communities. This can have quite perverse effects. It is no coincidence that Nahuatl, with many other ancestral languages of Mexico, largely disappeared from written use towards the end of the eighteenth century, just when political movements led by urban Spanish speakers were raising consciousness of Mexico as a separate country with a view to independence. The contrast between Spanish-speaking mestizos and ‘Indians’ speaking the ancient languages of Mexico was seen as a distraction from the emergence of the identity of the true Mexican. The older languages, seen as ‘backward’, had to go.

  This book attempts to convey something of the characteristic viewpoint on the world of each language whose story it tells. Evidently, living in a particular language does not define a total philosophy of life: but some metaphors will come to mind more readily than others; and some states of mind, or attitudes to others, are easier to assume in one language than another. It cannot be a matter of indifference which language we speak, or which languages our ancestors spoke. Languages frame, analyse and colour our views of the world. ‘I have three hearts,’ claimed Ennius, an early master poet in Latin, on the strength of his fluency in Latin, Greek and Oscan.6

  * The problem is not that the shared properties are always imaginary (as the Nazis’ criteria for Jewishness may have been), or even objectively unimportant for survival (e.g. as the possession of genes for sickle-cell anaemia and thalassaemia clearly predispose to inherited disease, while giving resistance to malaria). It stems from the logic of statistics: when picking out a population for study, a subset of properties always has to be chosen from a much larger set. But populations who share one subset may not share another—and who is to say (in advance of the study) which properties define the group with the interesting history? In practice, the properties chosen tend to bear out the preconceptions of the researchers, making (e.g.) the correspondence between genetic and traditional linguistic classification of the world’s population groups less than astounding. This necessary arbitrariness in setting up the statistical models is a fundamental flaw in the credibility of the population-gradient prehistory associated with Luca Cavalli-Sforza (e.g. 2001) and his many followers.

  * A common problem, ironically, is that writers’ conservatism has made their symbols refer to a version of the language already out of use. Memories of what was learnt in the scribal school can take precedence over what the scribe was actually hearing.

  †Egyptian has dropped hieroglyphs, and (now known as Coptic) is written in an alphabet derived from Greek. Akkadian and Sumerian are no longer written at all; so cuneiform is a dead letter. Phoenician too is gone, although every alphabet in use from Ireland to Siam is derived from its original script. Mayan glyphs were discontinued at the time of the Spanish conquest, and now all these languages are written in Roman. Meanwhile Chinese continues to be written in the script first standardised by the man who ordered the burning of every book in the country. See Chapter 4, ‘First Unity’, p. 137.

  2

  What It Takes to Be a World Language; or, You Never Can Tell

  The historic forces of merger and acquisition which, over the last five hundred years, built up many of the European languages in the world’s Top Twenty seemed to have spent themselves—or at least to be dammed up—b
y the end of the twentieth century.

  Overt imperialism is no longer defended. The end is no longer openly willed, though the two surgical wars that led off the twenty-first century, to conquer Afghanistan and Iraq, show that the means are still accepted. Likewise, the flow of large-scale migration is for the time being halted. In the past two centuries, flows from European countries had created much of what are now the English-speaking and the Portuguese-speaking worlds, mostly in the Americas, but also in Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a significant, but much smaller, flow from once colonised countries, which has created new language communities insulated in the heart of European lands.

  The trends that will form the future are still obscure. At present, there is still a multitude of migration volunteers, found in a much wider range of countries, not just ex-colonies; the main brake on their movement and resettlement is the unwillingness of their desired host countries to take them in. While some pundits write of an impending ‘clash of civilisations’, pitting most immediately the Arabic- and English-speaking worlds against each other, the political fabric guaranteed by powerful nations seems firm.

  But the world’s language future is not a matter of current affairs, or even news analysis. Language spread is a long-term thing, measured at the very least in generations and more often in centuries and millennia. The fundamental question of this book is to ask how—in what circumstances and with what dynamics—language communities have come to flourish in the past, as well as how some of them have declined and even met their ends.

  The most straightforward way in which a language can come to flourish could be called the Farmer’s Approach. All the community needs to do is stay united, and grow its population. This is Organic Growth, which is the typical story of large languages in eastern and southern Asia, and not unknown even in Europe, especially towards the east.* It is not a strategy of active initiative, but it does raise a consequent question: how have languages that follow such a policy been able to defend themselves from foreign communities, which might be tempted to invade and disrupt their steady growth?