Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  One can even speculate that if some political force had undercut, or superseded, Spanish control of the continent in that period, Spanish would have faded away very fast. After all, we can recall what happened to Sanskrit in South-East Asia at the end of the first millennium, or to Greek in the Near East when the Parthians and then Muslims advanced: both these were in similar situations to Spanish, top-level languages that remained the preserve of a small elite. There is even a comparative experiment to prove our point, since the Spaniards were indeed expelled from their Pacific colonies at the end of the nineteenth century.

  But before we consider how Spanish came to consolidate its hold on the American population, we need to consider the varied backgrounds of some of the American languages that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were still widely spoken and hardly losing ground.

  Past struggles: How American languages had spread

  Early on, as we have seen, Columbus was dispirited by the vast numbers of languages, with no mutual understanding among their speakers, which he encountered on his voyages. First running along the coast of the American mainland, Tierra Firme, he noted to his disappointment that ‘they no more understand one another than we do the Arabs’.17 The peoples he met as he cruised down the coasts of what are now Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama must have spoken Paya, Miskitu, Guaimí and Kuna.

  There was no relief from this apparently boundless babel when the Spaniards, from a base in Santiago de Cuba, began to explore the coastline farther north. Hernández de Córdoba, who in 1517 ran along the north and east of the Yucatán, could have encountered only (Yucatec) Maya in his two landfalls: a single language to be sure, but distinct from any the Spanish had previously encountered—and there is no sign that any attempt was made to identify or learn anything of the language.* Then in 1518 Juan de Grijalva undertook a longer coastal exploration, with more stops in the Yucatán, and one at Xicallanco, where he would have encountered a different Maya language, called by the Spanish Chontal de Tabasco—though its own speakers now call it Yokot’an—and then further stops at Potonchan, where the language would have been Zapotec, followed by two more in the region of modern Vera Cruz, where the language was Totonac. Sign language remained the best means of communication for the time being.

  This was not an encouraging beginning, if the Spaniards were hoping to establish widespread communications with the Indians; but it was not unrepresentative: at least two thousand distinct languages were being spoken in the Americas at the time, 350 of them in the central regions of Mexico and the isthmus which the Spanish explored first.18

  Nevertheless, when the Spaniards succeeded first in contacting, and then conquering, the few great multinational states that America had already produced, they found that Nebrija’s dictum, indeed predictive theory, ‘that always language was the companion of empire’ was amply borne out in the New World. The two great ancient empires of the Americas, the Aztecs and the Incas, had spread use of their languages throughout their realms, covering most of central Mexico and the central and southern Andes down to the Pacific Ocean. Less spectacular in terms of political and social development, but still highly gratifying to Spaniards in quest of gold, the Chibchan settlements in the northern Andes (at the centre of what is now Colombia) were characterised by a widespread common language, known as Muisca. And when Spain reached the southern region of the Río de la Plata and the Gran Chaco, it found a vast area where everyone spoke Tupinambá or Guaraní,* two closely related and mutually intelligible languages. Farther south still, in the chilly and mountainous land of Araucania, the Mapuche, so warlike that they were successfully to resist Spanish takeover until the mid-nineteenth century, were also united by a common language, called Mapudungun.

  These languages of wide extent were very much the exception, understood over less than 10 per cent of the territory of central and south America; but this territory was very highly populated, with perhaps as much as 40 per cent of the people. The widespread languages were to prove highly useful to an invading power, since when standardised as auxiliary languages in the new empire they could short-circuit the long and laborious process of establishing effective communications. By an amazing stroke of fortune, all but one (Tupinambá) turned out to be spoken in the parts of the continent that the Spanish were to make their own. This jumbo set of linguistic advantages may be one reason why the economic development of Spain’s empire in the Americas began at least a century sooner than those of Portugal, France or Britain. The vast support systems underlying the large-scale mining of gold in Zacatecas in Mexico, and of silver in Potosí in the Andes, would have been impossible without some common language, but the language was not in those days Spanish.

  These large-scale languages had not always been so widespread. Before looking at the use the Spanish made of them, it is worth considering the processes by which these indigenous linguistic areas arose.

  The spread of Nahuatl

  Zan iwki nonyaz in oompoliwi šocitl ah?

  Antle notleyo yez in kenmanian?

  Antle nihtawka yez in tlaltikpak?

  Ma nel šocitl, ma nel kwikatl!

  Ken konšiwaz noyollo, yewaya?

  On nen tonkizako in tlaltikpak.

  Shall I just go like the flowers which were fading?

  Will my glory be nothing one day?

  Will my fame be nothing in the earth?

  At least flowers, at least songs!

  Alas, what will my heart do?

  In vain do we pass this way across the earth!

  Nahuatl lyric (Cantares Mexicanos, folio 10 recto, ll. 23ff.)

  First in terms of magnificence, and also in population, was the realm where Nahuatl was spoken.* This language was usually known in the Spanish period as lengua mexicana, since the Aztecs, as we have seen (see Prologue), referred to themselves as Mexica, and their land as Mexico.* But this language had never been exclusive to the Aztec community. Specifically, when Cortés arrived in the valley of Mexico in 1519, Nahuatl was spoken by their neighbours in Tlaxcallan to the east also, outside the circle of the Aztecs’ vassal states, neighbours who, as it turned out, were ready to ally themselves with the Spanish against their fellow-speakers of Nahuatl. But this was just one of the last traces of a distribution of Nahuatl that pre-dated the Aztecs. In fact, there is evidence that the language’s presence in the general area of central Mexico goes back at least to the seventh century AD, when the monumental city of Teotihuacán was destroyed by fire: at that time the Pipil community are supposed to have moved south, through some interaction with the then dominant Toltec civilisation. The Toltecs left little concrete trace except a memory hallowed among the Aztecs who assumed control of central Mexico after them: but of the Pipil descendants who are left today, living far to the south in El Salvador, twenty or so still speak a form of Nahuatl. The straightforward assumption is that Nahuatl was the language of almost all the people living in the Valley of Mexico around the turn of the first millennium AD, encircling what was then a vast lake: the Tepanecs of Atzcapotzalco on the north-western shore, the states of Tezcoco and Culhuacán, apparently successors of the Toltecs, on the eastern. There were also areas of Nahuatl farther afield, westward in Jalisco on the Pacific coast, and eastward in the isthmus of Tehuantepec, perhaps remnants of an earlier empire, centred on the Toltecs or even Teotihuacán.

  Comparative studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have shown Nahuatl as almost the southernmost member of a family, known as Uto-Aztecan or Yuta-Nawan, which extends in a wide swath as far north as the Shoshone and Paiute peoples in modern Oregon. This reconstructed linguistic geography fits with the Aztecs’ foundation legend, by which they claimed to have come from Aztlan (’heron place’), an island somewhere unknown in the north-west. So they may have learnt their Nahuatl before they came to the Valley of Mexico in 1256, initially as vagrants and scavengers and eaters of snakes.† Yet they always represented themselves as a branch of the Chichimeca people, renowned hunter-gatherer nomads of the
north. If this story is true, they must have learnt their Nahuatl fairly late; for the Chichimeca or Pame language is related to Otomí, also spoken north and west of the Valley of Mexico, but quite unlike Nahuatl. The Aztecs may have been like the Normans in France, settling and learning a new language before projecting it through conquest.

  First squatting in the western region of Chapultepec, then chased out and enlisting as mercenaries with Culhuacán (another people who claimed descent from the Chichimeca), they accepted a very lowly billet on the lava beds of Tizaapan.

  ’Good,’ Coxcoxtli [king of Culhuacan] said. ‘They are monstrous, they are evil.

  Perhaps they will meet their end there, devoured by snakes,

  for it is the dwelling-place of many snakes.’

  But the Mexicans were overjoyed when they saw the snakes.

  They cooked them, they roasted them and they ate them…

  After twenty-five years of this, they brought matters to a head, requesting a Culhuacán princess, presumably as a bride, but then committing a characteristic atrocity on her.

  Then they slew the princess and they flayed her,

  and after they flayed her, they dressed a priest in her skin.

  Huitzilopochtli [Humming-bird on the Left, the Aztecs’ tribal god] then said:

  ’O my chiefs, go and summon Achitometl [the princess’s father].’

  The Mexicans went off, they went to summon him.

  They said, ‘O our lord, O my grandson, O lord, O king…

  your grandfathers, the Mexicans beseech you, they say,

  ’May he come to see, may he come to greet the goddess.

  We invite him.’…

  And when Achitometl arrived in Tizaapan, the Mexicans said in welcome:

  ’You have wearied yourself, O my grandson, O lord, O king.

  We, your grandfathers, we, your vassals, shall cause you to become ill.

  May you see, may you greet your goddess.’*

  ’Very good, O my grandfathers,’ he said.

  He took the rubber, the copal, the flowers, the tobacco and the food offering,

  and he offered them to her, he set them down before the false goddess whom they had flayed.

  Then Achitometl tore off the heads of the quail before his goddess:

  he still did not see the person before whom he was decapitating the quail.

  Then he made the offering of incense and the incense-burner blazed up, and Achitometl saw a man in his daughter’s skin.

  He was horror-struck.

  He cried out, he shouted to his lords and vassals,

  He said, ‘Who are they, eh, O Culhuacans?

  Have you not seen? They have flayed my daughter!

  They shall not remain here, the fiends!

  We shall slay them, we shall massacre them!

  The evil ones shall be annihilated here!’

  Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc. Crónica Mexicayotl, trans. Thelma D. Sullivan

  The Aztecs were then driven into the lake, but they made improvised rafts out of their arrows and shields, and when they emerged on the other side, they were inspired. It was prophesied that they must settle ‘where the eagle screeches, where he spreads his wings, where the eagle feeds, where the fish fly, where the serpent is torn apart’. In the distance, on a prickly-pear cactus, they saw this vision, of an eagle eating a snake. A voice cried out: ‘O Mexicans, it shall be here! ’ But no one could see who spoke. They knew that the reedy, but defensible, islands in the middle of the lake should be their home, Tenochtitlán, ‘place of the prickly-pear’. It was the year ome calli, ‘2 House’, 1325.

  This was the origin of the vast and miraculous lake city, which so entranced the invading Spaniards when they reached it in November 1519. The Aztecs had regrouped and prospered in their lakeland home for a hundred years, and then begun to expand their domains through a series of aggressive wars. First, under Itzcoatl (’Obsidian-Snake’), 1427-40, they achieved control of the Valley of Mexico as a whole, then under Motecuhzoma I Ilhuicamina (’Heaven-Shooter’) they outflanked the territory of their resistant neighbours to the west, Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala, to reach the Caribbean coast and the central highlands to the south. Two more long-reigning tlatoani added to the empire, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century the Aztecs had conquered about 100,000 square kilometres of territory in the centre of modern Mexico, from the Caribbean to the Pacific, including the curious enclave of Xoconochco, down the coast on the Pacific border of Guatemala.

  A single minister, Tlacaelel, presided over the first five decades of this bloody expansion. With an eye to the future, his policy was to burn all the books of conquered peoples to erase memories of a pre-Aztec past. Even though Huetxotzingo and Tlaxcala had been bypassed in the Aztec advance, he imposed on them a curious agreement to conduct continual, but formally regulated, warfare, the šoci-yāōyōtl or ‘flower-war’, a regular engagement to do battle in order to capture prisoners for sacrifice. The word šocitl, ‘flower’, has a positive, ethereal value in Nahuatl imagery (for example, in šocitl in kwīkatl, ‘the flower the song’, meaning ‘poetry’, used in the verse that begins this section), but it is never free of association with the role of flowers in sacrificial offerings, just like human blood.

  Familiarity with Nahuatl was spread all over central Mexico by this successful aggression of the Aztecs, but it does not seem to have happened at the expense of the languages of tributary peoples. Rather the Aztecs planted officials, especially tribute overseers, in all the major cities, and ensured that the subject peoples provided a corps of nauatlato, ‘interpreters’, to ensure effective transmission of the rulers’ wishes. Two Nahuatl speakers were among the officials from the subject Totonac territory who met Cortés when he first landed. And Nahuatl had clearly been spread by other, unknown, population movements prior to this: Cortés’s interpreter Malin-tzin, for instance, was a native speaker of the language, but she had acquired it in Coatzacoalcos, on the Caribbean coast 50 kilometres south of the border of the Aztec empire.

  Before the Spanish conquest, Nahuatl should thus be seen as at best an effective lingua franca of a multinational and multilingual empire: the empire included areas where the indigenous population to this day speak Zapotec, Mixtec, Tarascan, Otomí, Huastec and Totonac languages, none of them related to one another or to Nahuatl. But in the fifteenth century, contact between the subject lands and the centre in Tenochtitlán must have been intense, at the level of tribute-gathering, and also through the network of pochteca, ‘merchants’, who also functioned as ambassadors and spies, and were so highly placed in the Aztec hierarchy that they could offer their slaves for sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli along with the war captives offered by great warriors.

  The spread of Quechua

  K’ akichanpi millmacháyuj,

  nina ráuraj puka runa,

  mana õuqaqa atinichu

  watuyta chay simiykita.

  Imatachus õiwankipas

  manapuni yachanichu.*

  Red man who blazes like fire

  and on the chin raises thick wool,

  it is quite impossible for me

  to understand your weird language.

  I do not know what you are saying to me,

  I cannot know in any way.

  (An Inca addresses Pizarro, before the battle of Cajamarca)

  Atau Wallpaj p’ uchakakuynninpa wankan

  The Tragedy of the End of Atawallpa19

  Language spread had been a far more complex process in the growth of the other great pre-Columbian empire, the Inca realm known as Tawantinsuyu, ‘Four Portions’. When the Spanish reached Peru, its empire—and its language—covered the whole altiplano to the west of the Andes, from Quito in the north to Talca in the south, linked by a royal road that stretched some 4,000 kilometres, and uniting under one government the Andean and Pacific strips of modern Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and northern Chile. The language is known by its speakers as runa simi, ‘human speech’, but there was no accepted term for it when t
he Spanish arrived: Inca Garcilaso, a well-connected bilingual writing at the end of the sixteenth century, refers to it always as la lengua cortesana de Cuzco, ‘the courtly language of Cuzco’. The first published grammar, by Domingo de Santo Tomás, in 1560, names it, however, la lengua general del Perú, llamada, Quichua, following a tradition that had been attested for at least twenty years,20 and this has stuck. The term qhišwa actually refers to ‘temperate zone’ or ‘valley’, intermediate between the coast and the highlands. The general view at the time was that the temperate zone round Andahuaylas in Apurímac province, south of the city of Cuzco (Qusqu, ‘navel’—the Inca capital), had been the heartland of the language.21

  In fact, this seems to have been a later rationalisation.22 Quechua was by origin the language of a coastal region round Lima, with an oracle located at Pachakamaj (’earth-ruler’), the base of a seaborne trading community called the Chincha, who spread their language primarily as a trade jargon out towards the north, particularly up into the northern highlands round Cajamarca and into Ecuador, the area that was to be designated the Chincha-suyu, the most northerly portion of the Inca empire. This all happened in the first millennium AD, long before the Incas were a force to be reckoned with. The grafting of the language on to the growing Inca empire would in fact come almost as an afterthought, by a process rather similar to the adoption of Aramaic by the politic Persian emperor Darius (see Chapter 3, ‘The story in brief: Language leapfrog’, p. 47).