Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  The Dutch, the principal successor power in the region, accepted the linguistic status quo; after 1692 they required arriving chaplains in Madras to learn Portuguese within a year of their arrival as well as the local language of their residence (usually Tamil) ‘in order that they may be able to instruct in Protestant religion the Pagans who are servants or slaves of the Company or its agents’.7 In 1704 the Dutch governor of Ceylon (now Śri Lanka), Cornelius Jan Simonsz, noted that someone speaking Portuguese could be understood anywhere on that island; and in 1807 the Reverend James Cordiner, in his A description of Ceylon, wrote that ‘A corruption of their original language is still spoken over all the sea coasts. It is very easily learned, and proves of great utility to a traveller who has not time to study the more difficult dialects of the natives.’*

  Ironically, one of the strongest citadels of Portuguese was the Dutch power’s own capital in Batavia on the island of Java. To preach the gospel, wrote Jean Brun in 1675, ‘they will acquire Portuguese Bibles and various devotional books in Portuguese and Indian languages and recite the catechism in these languages, because they are understood by most of the Indians… ‘8 In 1708 there was even an appeal by Protestant priests there to the governor-general to maintain exclusive use of Portuguese in some churches, claiming:

  The Portuguese language is in everyday and familiar use by the slaves of families who come from Ceylon and the [Coromandel] Coast; by all the masters of slaves and by their children in daily dealings with the slaves and Christian natives; by the persons who come from Siam, Malacca, Bengal, Coromandel Coast, the Isle of Ceylon, the Malabar Coast, Surat and even from Persia; and the leading pagans who inhabit this city and do business with the Christians or their slaves learn to speak Portuguese.9

  But the language was changed by its expansion: it was widely pidginised, and while some Portuguese can still be heard over most of this area to this day, outside Portugal’s most substantial long-term colonies (Angola and Mozambique in Africa, Goa in India) it is in the form of creoles heavily influenced by its local competitor languages. In Indo-Portuguese creoles, for example, still spoken in scattered communities along the Malabar coast of the subcontinent from Daman and Diu in Gujarat to Śri Lanka in the south, the diphthong spelt ei, absent in Indian languages, is reduced to a high [ē] vowel, very different from modern Portuguese, where it is pronounced more like [ai].* The complex inflexions of the language inherited from Latin have been replaced by less involved structures: in Diu, ‘dog’ may still be cáo and ‘son’ filho, but in the plural, instead of cáes and filhos, we have cáo-cáo and fi-fi; verbal tenses are likewise analytic, eu tá vai, T am going’, eu já comeu, ‘I ate’, eu had vai, ‘I shall go’, instead of the standard (and irregular) vou, comi, irei. In Śri Lanka, they have even absorbed the local (Sinhala and Tamil) use of postpositions: eu já vi terra por, ‘I came by land’.10 Similar, transformed, varieties of Portuguese are still spoken in Malacca in Malaysia (where the language is known as Kristang, betraying its old religious overtones, from Portuguese cristá, ‘Christian’), in Macao in southern China, and in Timor, on the southernmost edge of the East Indies.

  The third, and now most significant, type of spread of Portuguese occurred when it was taken up, essentially unchanged, by a new population. This has happened, but only to a tiny extent, in the African colonies of Angola and Mozambique (where recent estimates11 put the native-speaking ‘Lusophone’ populations at 57,600 and above 30,000—respectively 0.5 per cent and 0.2 per cent of their populations, even if the same source claims that 27 per cent of Mozambicans know Portuguese as a second language). There is also a small remnant of Portuguese in Goa.† But it has happened triumphantly in what was Portugal’s largest colony, Brazil: the population is now 166 million, and 95 per cent of them, 158 million, have Portuguese as their first language. This means that speakers in Brazil now outnumber those in Portugal sixteen to one.

  Portuguese in America

  How, then, has the language come to be transplanted into Brazil so effectively, but nowhere else? The reasons are, of course, historical, but also political and above all economic. In brief, Brazil was the only one of its colonies where Portugal found both a significant source of wealth which was attractive to immigrants, and no pre-existing power strong enough to resist its domination.

  India was certainly a source of wealth, from trade in a vast range of commodities; but the local powers that the Portuguese encountered there effectively resisted any Portuguese break-out from their coastal settlements. In Sri Lanka, known to them as Ceiláo, the Portuguese at one time had effective control, and might well have established themselves, and perhaps their language, in the long term if they had not soon been expelled by the Dutch. Farther east, in the islands of the East Indies, the Portuguese looked for profit from the trade in spices; but the bottom fell out of the market for these commodities too soon. It is in any case arguable—not least from comparing the fate of other European empires in Asia—that the kind of wealth derivable from trade with these countries was never going to attract large numbers of immigrants, and so build a large Portuguese-language community. Trade requires capital, or at least a significant military force to impose terms; as a result, governments and large-scale organisations have an overwhelming advantage. Where trade, rather than production, is the source of wealth, the only way for large numbers of immigrants and small-scale outsiders to take part is if they become pirates.

  In Africa, although Portugal had held small settlements all down the western coast since the fifteenth century, principally as staging ports for the carreira da Índia, no serious source of wealth besides the slave trade was ever discovered. They never attracted large numbers of Portuguese-speaking settlers. But this trade contributed mightily, at one remove, to the spread of Portuguese in South America. Of the 10 million African slaves shipped to the Americas between 1526 and 1870, 3.6 million went to Brazil alone,12 at first to provide labour for sugar plantations, later for cotton and tobacco. As in the other slave economies of the Americas, the Africans could not bring their languages with them. They were in contact with too few of their ex-neighbours to speak those languages, for the slave markets distributed them without regard to origin all over the colonies, and they had perforce to learn the language of their new masters. Often too those very masters would become the fathers of their children; in a very few generations most of the population came to be of mixed blood, but nonetheless speakers just of Portuguese.

  White immigration too was more substantial into Brazil than to anywhere else in the Portuguese possessions. Early on, neither Portugal’s court nor its people had taken much interest in their American colony, since it had unaccountably not yielded anything like the copious gold and silver that the Spanish were extracting from their colonies in Mexico and Peru.

  But the hostile attentions of other European powers, and the effort needed to repel them, then concentrated Portugal’s sense that here was something worth having. The Spanish had respected the claims in accord with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas—indeed, from 1580 to 1640 Spain and Portugal were united under a single (Spanish) government—but other powers that were not party to it had been more dangerous. The French had posed the first challenge in 1555, with raids and attempted settlements that persisted until 1615, then the English (less seriously) from 1582 to 1595. Most aggressive were the Dutch. After some early inconsequential attacks in 1598-9, from the 1620s until 1641 they succeeded in taking possession of the whole of the Brazilian north-east from Sáo Luis to Aracaju, and holding it until 1654. In 1624 they had even briefly taken the very heart of the Portuguese colony, its first capital at Baía (also called Salvador). The Portuguese seem to have found the determination, and hence the resources, to retake them only when they resigned themselves finally to the loss of most of their colonies in India and beyond. (Indeed, as we shall soon see, those became the next target of the Dutch.)

  A series of resolute expeditions had mapped out most of the interior by the mid-seventeenth century.
Known as bandeiras, ‘flags’, they were inspired by the (mostly unavailing) quest for gold, silver, jewels or natives to capture as slaves. Their main success had lain in pre-emptively defining borders with Spain’s colonies that were being rather less actively explored from the opposite side of the continent. (The borders were actually agreed a hundred years later in the Treaties of Madrid, 1750, Pardo, 1761 and Ildefonso, 1777, which finally erased the notional Line of Tordesillas.)

  Despite these explorations, until the second half of the seventeenth century the only Portuguese to settle more than 400 kilometres from the coast had been the missionaries, especially the Jesuits. And as in the Spanish colonies, they had found it easier to preach in a language other than their own. Most of the local languages they called línguas travadas, ‘hobbled tongues’, so there was evidently little enthusiasm for them. In a celebrated sermon preached to a departing mission in 1657, Father Antonio Vieira said he had heard someone call the Amazon the ’rio Babel’, for its eighty languages: ‘What must it be to learn Nheengaíba, or Juruna, or Tapajó, or Teremembé, or Mamaianá, whose very names seem to strike terror?… To the Apostles God gave tongues of fire, but to their successors a fire of tongues. The tongues of fire came to an end, but the fire of tongues did not, because this fire, this spirit, this love of God makes one learn, study and know those languages.’13

  For all this heady combination of language-learning and the love (or fear) of God, in Brazil it had turned out that Tupinambá (a language very closely related to the Guaraní of Paraguay) could be used everywhere (see Chapter 10, ‘Past struggles: How American languages had spread’, p. 348), and it came to be called the língua geral (the Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish lengua general). In the early days of the colony, it was the main means of communication with the natives. One Jesuit witness wrote, about 1560: ‘Almost all who come to the Kingdom and are settled and in communication with the Indians get to know it within a short time, and the sons and daughters of the Portuguese born here get to know it better than the Portuguese do, mainly in the captaincy of Sao Vicente.’14

  Organising the Indians into aldeias (villages) and reduçáes (reserved areas), the Jesuits in fact resisted the inroads of other white settlers. This kind of resistance to a specifically colonial development of the interior was to last until the mid-eighteenth century. One effect was that the use of Portuguese remained confined to the coastal districts for the first two centuries of the colony’s existence. Only in 1759 did the Jesuits lose their power to protect and organise the Indians in this way, when they were stripped of their powers and expelled from the country.* For good measure, the further use of the língua geral was banned at the same time.

  But Brazil was now to become a more appealing prospect for settlers. After the reassertion of Portuguese power in 1654, a stream of economic developments at last provided a motive for large-scale immigration from Europe, and with it the spread of the Portuguese language. Ore beds with gold, emeralds, diamonds and other precious stones were found in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, principally in the southern central area henceforth called Minas Gerais, ‘General Mines’, but also inland in Baía, Goiás and Mato Grosso. The result was the world’s first gold rush, coming mostly from Portugal, and thereafter an eighteenth-century economy with government revenues founded securely on gold. When the gold ran out towards the end of that century, its place was taken by the export profits from cattle ranching, especially in sales of leather, an industry that had taken advantage of the opening up of massive grasslands in these same south and central areas.

  The result was a massive, and subsequently sustained, increase in Brazil’s Portuguese-speaking population, both from immigration (including import of slaves), and from natural growth. This had comprised less than 150,000 around 1650; by 1770 they comprised over 1,500,000; and this in a period when the rest of the Americas (Spanish- and English-speaking alike) had just about doubled their numbers. In the same period, Brazil had come to provide the second and third most populous Portuguese-speaking cities in the world, Baía (Salvador) and Rio de Janeiro yielding only to Lisbon. This influx of rich and prolific immigrants from Europe, which reinforced the influx of uprooted slaves from Africa, crowded out the previous língua geral of the interior, Tupinambá, to say nothing of the tiny languages spoken by individual tribes. It was estimated in 1985 that there were no more than 155,000 Brazilians who spoke indigenous languages, approximately one for every thousand speakers of Portuguese.15

  Ultimately, then, the growth of Portuguese to its present status (176 million native speakers, ranking seventh in the world, ahead of German, French and Japanese) owes almost everything to the economic development, and consequent population growth, of Brazil over the past three hundred years, and very little to its spread from Portugal as a language for colonial administration, or as a lingua franca in Asia, both of which peaked over four hundred years ago.

  Dutch interlopers

  Saïdjah kwam te Batavia aan. Hy verzocht een heer hem in deenst te nemen, hetgeen die heer terstond deed omdat hy Saïdjah niet verstond. Want te Batavia heeft men gaarne bedienden die nog geen maleisch spreken en dus nog niet zo bedorven zyn als anderen die langer in aanraaking waren met europese beschaving. Saïdjah leerde spoedig maleisch, maar paste braaf op…

  Saïdjah came to Batavia. He asked a gentleman to take him into service, which the gentleman at once did, because he did not understand Saïdjah[’s language]. For in Batavia people liked servants who did not yet speak Malay and so were not so spoiled as the others who had been longer in contact with European civilization. Saïdjah learnt Malay quickly, but behaved well…

  Multatuli, Max Havelaar (Amsterdam, 1860), ch. 17

  Pelabur habis Palembang tak alah

  Rations finished, Palembang not beaten

  Malay proverb*

  After a century of stability, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth, the Portuguese trading empire in Asia was lost almost as rapidly as it was built up. This was overwhelmingly due to the efforts of another small European power, the Dutch.* The Dutch speedily divested Portugal of the sources of its Asian incomes, and became a fixture in the East Indies for three centuries. But in our history of world languages, they have only a negative part to play. The Dutch career demonstrates that a successful European imperial power may yet leave little or no linguistic trace in its domains—further evidence, in fact, that Nebrija was wrong.

  The Dutch imperial career began against the odds, almost as a commercial sideline in their war of independence from Spain, a struggle that was to last intermittently from 1568 to 1648, but which in fact, from 1588, allowed the burghers of the new republic of the United Provinces considerable freedom of action. Despite the uncertain times, the supply of luxury goods to northern Europe (mostly from Asia, and often by re-export from Portugal) had become proverbially ‘rich trades’ for Dutch merchants in the 1590s. Then in 1598 Dutch ships, goods and merchants were embargoed from all ports in the Spanish/Portuguese empire. Minds were duly concentrated, and the immediate result was an explosion of East India trading enterprise—by 1601 fourteen Dutch fleets, with sixty-five vessels, had set sail on behalf of eight different companies.16 Such a splurge of competition could only be adverse both at source in the Indies and in the customer markets of Europe, and so in 1602, with the collusion of all the companies involved, the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—VOC) was founded as a state monopoly of such trade. Somewhat later, in 1624, a similar organisation, the West India Company (Westindische Compagnie–-WIC) was established to control Dutch interests in the western hemisphere.

  Of the two companies, WIC had far less long-term success as a procurer of Dutch real estate and colonial populations. It began well; from 1623 a tract of North America (covering most of what is now New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, and the southern half of New York State) was taken as ‘Nieuw Nederland’, and outright conquests from Portugal followed, of the Guinea coast in 1637-42, of northern B
razil (as ‘Nieuw Holland’) in 1631, of Angola in 1641, as well as the acquisition of less crucial holdings in the Antilles and Guyanas. Around 1640, WIC was in control of the Atlantic markets in sugar, slavery and furs. But by 1665 all but the Antilles and Guyanas had been lost. Besides the recaptures by Portugal, Nieuw Nederland was taken forcibly by England (and New Amsterdam became New York) in 1664. WIC retrenched to being a simple trading company, making a good living where previously it had aspired to rule. There was still plenty of gold in Guinea, and a demand for African slaves in the Netherlands. Dutch remained, in the small colonies, as a language of administration. Nowadays there are a bare thousand native speakers of Dutch in the republic of Suriname (Dutch Guiana), while perhaps a quarter of the half-million population use it as a second language. The Antilles remain for the most part dependent on the Netherlands, but fewer than 10 per cent of the 185,000 people have Dutch as a first language.

  The VOC, on the other hand, went on to real colonial greatness. In the East Indies, the source of the spice trade, they displaced the Portuguese permanently from Ambon, and later Ternate and Tidore, in the Moluccas (1605-62), Malacca in Malaya (1641), and Macassar (modern Ujung Pandang) in Sulawesi (1667). They also went beyond the scope of Portugal’s holdings by seizing Jakarta in western Java (1619) as their centre of operations (comparable to Goa for the Portuguese), and renaming it Batavia.* Through intrigue rather than war, they displaced the Portuguese as monopolists in the Japan trade (1639), with a permanent base in Nagasaki.† In the Indian subcontinent, they established an early foothold at Pulicat (1613), and between 1638 and 1661 they took from the Portuguese Ceylon and their whole string of southern Indian possessions from Kannur round to Negapatam. In Africa, they were unable for long to dislodge the Portuguese from Angola or Mozambique, but went on to found their own South African colony in between at Cape Town (Kaapstad) in 1652. Willem Bosman remarked in 1704 that the Portuguese had been ‘as setting-dogs to spring the game, which as soon as they had done, was seized by others’.17