Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  Curiously but significantly, it was only in Africa that their colonial intrusiveness bore any linguistic fruit. It was here that Dutch settlers were attracted, just as Brazil, in the end, attracted settlers from Portugal. The Dutch settlers were not merchants, nor miners, but farmers (i.e., in Dutch, Boer). Their language, a mildly simplified version of Dutch that came to be known as Afrikaans (’African’), developed and grew with their population, even after the British had gained control of the country.* Subsequently, in 1836, tiring of British rule, they spread out on the Great Trek, into the east of what is now South Africa, to found the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Their influence was reduced temporarily after their defeat by the British in the Boer War of 1899-1902. But numbers prevailed in the white community—as they were later to do as between black and white—and in the following half-century Afrikaans came to be explicitly the language of the South African ruling majority. Afrikaans in 1991 had 6.2 million speakers in South Africa, centred in Pretoria and Bloemfontein, a million of them native bilinguals with English. Another 4 million there were using it as a second or third language. Taking all of them together, the 10 million who know the language compare significantly with the 20 million or so who now speak Dutch worldwide (13.4 million in the Netherlands, another 5 million in Belgium).18

  Farther east, Dutch presence proved shorter lasting. Ceylon and southern India, like the Cape colony, passed into British hands at the turn of the eighteenth century as a side effect of political changes in Europe. The century and a half of Dutch influence that was then brought to an end is hard now to discern. But although there was some similar back-and-forth in the East Indies—during which a thirty-year-old Stamford Raffles became for five years lieutenant-governor of Java, and chanced on the lost Buddhist wonder city of Borobodur—it ended with the British contenting themselves with the Malay peninsula and the northern coast of Borneo. Dutch control of the islands was ultimately maintained; in fact it lasted until the Second World War, a full three hundred years from their original dispossession of the Portuguese.

  Why, then, is Dutch not now the official government language, or at least a lingua franca, in the state of Indonesia, the successor of the Dutch East Indies? Given that Dutch is another Germanic language, one is almost tempted to detect a ‘curse of Germanic’. Remember that despite their awesome conquests in western Europe and North Africa in the fifth century AD, the Franks, Vandals and Goths, alone among the great conquerors of the era, had never spread their language across their domains. And now, in the modern age from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, their descendants the Dutch were no more capable of winning new speakers for their language, when around them the British were spreading English in Malaya, Portuguese was persisting in its enclave on Timor, the Spanish were trying to bring up the Philippines in Castilian, and indeed the French were attempting to seed Indo-China as an outpost of francophony.

  The fundamental reason for the curious absence of the Dutch language is the pragmatism of its speakers in the Indies.* They were there, after all, with two motives: primarily to make money, and secondarily—a long way second—to spead Protestant Christianity in their own dear Calvinist form. In the event, both motives called for the use of a foreign contact language, rather than their own mother tongue. For trade, in the first instance, there was evidently a need to use whatever language came to hand; and it turned out that there was already a language that the trading community of the East Indies had had in common for at least two centuries, and perhaps much longer.

  This was Malay, Bahasa Mclayu (or in Dutch spelling Bahasa Melajoe), best known as the jargon of merchants having dealings at the entrepôt of Malacca. Malacca had been founded only at the beginning of the fifteenth century, but had grown very fast, through exploitation of its commanding position on the strait, and cultivation of the Chinese emperor. It is likely that the spread of the language had started earlier than this. Malacca had been founded by a wayward prince from Śrī Vijaya, a state that had cultivated wide trading interests from the seventh to thirteenth centuries AD. And Jambi, one of its principal cities, had also been called Malāyu. Whatever Malay’s origins, with this one language in hand a Dutch merchant could do business all over the Indies,* an added advantage since the VOC was always interested in trade all over the area, not just simple exports from the sources of supply to the Netherlands.19

  Likewise, in order to spread the faith and practice of the Dutch Reformed Church, it was easier, and quicker, to make converts when one was not restricted to those who already knew Dutch, or who might be willing to learn it. Early on, there had been an attempt to establish schools at Ambon in Dutch, with as many as sixteen of them running in 1627. But there were in fact few opportunities for children who learnt the language to use it after they graduated, and so they tended to forget it.20 Probably this is a common feature of the early years of a language cohort, when they have not yet had time to be promoted up the system, and so are mostly dealing with adults who do not share the language. But the Dutch pragmatists were not prepared to wait, and the experiment was terminated. Malay became identified with Reformed religion too, designated as the language for ‘a common indigenous Church’.21

  We might briefly query why the Dutch pragmatism did not extend to making use of another pre-existing lingua franca in their domains, namely Portuguese, which we have already noted they were required to use in dealings in Ceylon, and had indeed spread, willy-nilly, into their own centre of operations at Batavia. Certainly, some Dutch pastors, notably François Valentijn in the 1680s, were inclined to favour it over Malay in the work of the Church.22 It is notable that conversions, never very many, were found mostly in congregations that had previously been converted to Catholicism by the Portuguese; the Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims turned out to be largely impervious to the new creed. But the association between Portuguese and Catholicism remained strong in Dutch Calvinist hearts; and in business, there must also have been a residue of pride, resisting any place for the language of their defeated enemies—indeed, until 1640 and the separation of Spain and Portugal, their resented overlords—in the mechanism of their own organisation.

  And so Malay became the language of the Dutch Indies, first as a practical short-term measure, but by the eighteenth century by official policy.* In 1731-3 the Bible was issued in a Malay translation by Melchior Leydekker and Georg Henrik Werndly, and the latter brought out a grammar of the language in 1736. But despite the attempts to preach in it, knowledge of the language did not penetrate particularly deeply. Malay was a means of communication among administrators, managers, merchants and rulers, and so it stayed. Given the highly devolved nature of Dutch imperial administration, which largely kept the native power chiefdoms in place and was mediated through them, this at first worked well.

  But the subsequent history of the language as used in the Dutch Indies was not a smooth one. In the mid-eighteenth century, as world markets came to value coffee from Java over spices from Ambon, the need grew to have direct dealings with the Javanese rulers, whose knowledge of Malay had never been good. The return of Dutch administration after the British interregnum under Stamford Raffles (1811-16) was on a new basis: the VOC had been abolished in 1795 after a collapse in its profitability, and there was a new concern for administrators to be in contact with the subject population. A decree of 1811 called for officials to know Javanese. Raffles himself, when he took over, was very much in favour, opining in 1813: ‘Hitherto the communication with inhabitants of the country has been chiefly through illiterate Interpreters, or when direct, through the medium of a barbarous dialect of Malays, confounded and confused by the introduction of Portuguese and Dutch.’23

  But when the Dutch were back in charge, there followed a controversy, which was to last throughout the nineteenth century, concerning the relative weight to be given to Javanese and Malay, with resolutions in 1827, 1837 and 1839 promoting Malay again. The practical value of knowing the actual language of a majority of the people was clear, but t
he embarrassing fact remained that Javanese, with elaborate inflexions and distinct sub-languages marking different levels of politeness, was far harder to learn tolerably than Malay. Results were never good, and most officials reverted to their broken and undignified, but always serviceable, dienst-Maleisch (’service-Malay’), known less respectfully as brabbel-Maleisch or klontong-Maleisch (’jabber-’ or ‘clod-Malay’).24

  For all its faults (a standard system of Romanised spelling was specified only in 190125) it is this Malay which has become the official language of the state of Indonesia, under the wishful title of Bahasa Indonesia. Even today, though, only 17-30 million people there actually have it as a first language, perhaps a tenth of those who can use it as a second language. Compare this with the 75 million whose first language is Javanese, and the 726 languages that are listed as spoken somewhere within Indonesia. The Dutch, through their fitful policy, had succeeded in giving a common language to their old colony, but not their own.

  La francophonie

  La langue franšaise est une femme. Et cette femme est si belle, si fière, si modeste, si hardie, si touchante, si voluptueuse, si chaste, si noble, si familière, si folle, si sage, qu’ on l’ aime de toute son šme, et qu’ on n’ est jamais tenté de lui ětre infidèle.

  The French language is a woman. And that woman is so beautiful, so proud, so modest, so bold, so touching, so voluptuous, so chaste, so noble, so familiar, so mad, so wise, that one loves her with all one’s soul, and is never tempted to be unfaithful to her.

  Anatole France, 1844-1924

  This quotation, widely known to speakers and lovers of French, is eminently but characteristically self-conscious and self-regarding.* The French have taken enthusiastically to the notion that their language has particular virtues, even—and this is curious for such an emotional and ethnocentric idea—that it is more rational than other languages. Perhaps more honestly than others set on global conquests, they came to assert that they were fulfilling a mission civilisatrice which went beyond the making of foreign profits for themselves, and foreign converts for their God.

  The outcome, in terms of actual expansion of the language community of native and second-language speakers, what they call la francophonie,* has been modest, at least by the standards of its direct competitors (and neighbours): French can now count 77 million native speakers worldwide (two-thirds of them in France itself), and another 51 million second-language speakers.† This places it tenth in the list of language populations, effectively the smallest of the major European languages, and less populous even than German, which is hardly spoken at all outside its home continent.

  French in Europe

  French is by origin the species of Romance spoken in Gaul, which was broadly taken to be the realm of the Franks. Its modern name for itself, franšais [frásέ], comes from the Germanic adjective frankisk, through the Latinisation franciscus. For political and topographical reasons, it came to be typified and led by the dialect of the Ile-de-France region in the north-east. The Ile-de-France has many navigable rivers heading in different directions, hence is a natural crossroads. And so it was a place where speakers of many dialects met, and differences were levelled out. What is more, from the time of Clovis (late fifth century) it mostly had the royal court of the Franks somewhere within it. Different cities flourished and waned, but by the thirteenth century the city of Paris evidently enjoyed a particular cachet; a poet wrote:

  Si m’ escuse de mon langage Excuse my language,

  Rude, malostru et sauvage rude, ungainly and wild,

  Car nés ne sui pas de Paris. for I am not a native of Paris.26

  A milestone in the early history of French was the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterěts in 1539, by which King Franαois I, among many other provisions, required that official documents, whether from courts or parish registers, should all be produced en langage maternel fronαois et non autrement—in French mother tongue, and not otherwise, specifically not in Latin.27 But despite the homely-sounding phrase, the king was in fact referring to his own mother tongue, not that of his subjects: the act was interpreted as requiring the use of Parisian French, and so provoked merveilleuses complaintes (’wondrous complaints’) in the Provençal-speaking south.28 The French political centre was henceforth to be language conscious, and to take action to enforce consistency at the official level, despite the persistence of different spoken languages in its realms.

  What sort of language was French? To the ear, a major characteristic of French among its Romance cousins was the loss of almost all vowels in final syllables, and later of final consonants. (Final a usually survived, but was reduced to an indistinct [ē] ‘uh’ sound.) This slack pronunciation led to some major changes in the grammar, due to the breakdown of the Latin system of meaningful word endings (inflexion), at least in so far as they marked the function of nouns in sentences, and the person (I vs you vs he/she/it) of verbs. So French became a language with a rather rigid word order, and strings of short pronouns up at the front of sentences. Where Latin had dico tibi illud, ‘I tell you that’, French has je te le dis [žētētēdi], and the Latin ending -o to mark the subject ‘I’ has effectively been replaced by a separable subject prefix je [žə].* But in other ways, French was rather like Portuguese, replacing n and m at the end of syllables with a nasalised twang, changing its y sound to [ž], and voicing s to [z] when it came between vowels. Common Romance unum bonum vinum rubium, ‘a good wine red’, became in France un bon vin rouge. L after a vowel mostly changed to [w] (as it does in Cockney and Estuary English), and was written with u: maledictum, ‘cursed’, came out as maudit, pellem, ‘skin’, as peau, collum, ‘neck’, as cou.

  And French was also prey to some extreme processes of vowel strangulation, especially of what are called mid vowels, e and o: so much so that its precise pronunciation has varied greatly down the centuries, and of course been given considerable scope for language snobbery, if people’s diphthongs did not come out just right. These are the processes that have played havoc with French spelling, so that what was long ago written (and pronounced, more or less) seniōres rēgālēs fāmōsī dēbent habēre unum bellum palātium, ‘famous royal lords must have a fine palace’, came first to be pronounced much as it is now spelt, les seigneurs royaux fameux doivent avoir un beau palais, but then went on to sound quite different: [le seiñœr rwayo famœ dwavt avwar œT bo paləP].

  In the early second millennium AD, this language began to spread outside France. Notably, in 1066 it was transplanted north of the English Channel, by Norman invaders, who themselves had been speaking it only for a couple of generations. (See Chapter 12, ‘Endurance test: Seeing off Norman French’, p. 458.) As it turned out, the advance of the language was not permanent. It flourished for over two centuries as a language for the elite in England, but gradually lost touch with the Ile-de-France. As Chaucer wrote of his Prioress towards the end of the fourteenth century:

  And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly

  After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe

  For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.29

  Then came the Black Death: a social revolution followed, and English-speaking commoners were able to move into more influential positions in the English cities. French died out in England.*

  About the same time, the Crusades also spread French outside its native soil, but in the opposite direction. These military escapades derived most of their support from France, and they did succeed in setting up Frankish domains in Palestine which lasted out the twelfth century. Nevertheless, the language communities did not long survive the Muslim reconquests in the thirteenth. One long-term effect, though, was to create a special association of ‘the Frank’ with the idea of a European at large in the East—seen in the widespread Arab term for a European, feringī, and the still useful term lingua franca, denoting an unofficial language of wider communication, which was first used in the Levant.†

  The Parisian standard for French spread to neighbouring countries before the French
state started its serious efforts to spread its power and language abroad. Neither Belgium nor Switzerland, whose boundaries have always included Romance speakers as long as both the boundaries and the language have existed, ever attempted to set up a competing national standard. Geneva had its own distinct Romance dialect, Savoyard, but has used French for official business since the thirteenth century; it was the effective capital of the French Protestants during the wars of the Reformation. Farther south are Savoy, Nice and Monaco. They all had historic links across the Alps, and long resisted becoming part of metropolitan France. But they have largely accepted its language.

  Why did French gain such an association with high culture in Europe, especially spreading eastward? The fundamental reason was the growth of France’s population and agricultural wealth; the rich of France could afford the best, and their taste was influential.§ France was the most densely populated country in medieval and early modern Europe, and so tended to set the standard for the rest. French became the business language of European merchants. And the same principle of geographical centrality that had made Paris the crossroads of France made France itself the crossroads of west European Christendom. In 1164 John of Salisbury wrote to Thomas à Becket: ‘I took a detour by Paris. When I saw the abundance of foods, the happiness of the people, the consideration accorded to the clergy, the majesty and glory of the whole Church, the diverse activities of the philosophers, I thought I was seeing, filled with admiration, Jacob’s ladder, its top touching the sky and angels passing up and down upon it.’30