Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  What, then, remains of the Japanese overseas language community, half a century after Japan’s expulsion? Many who survive from the generations that attended Japanese schools can still converse in the language. But it seems that it is hardly used as a means of communication, even among this generation:70 the opprobrium that the Japanese had stirred up lasted so long that it prevented any advantage being taken of this heritage when Japanese industrial interests began to spread again. The old Japanese empire has in no way served as a launch-pad for the global spread of Japanese products, and latterly of Japanese culture, in the last four decades of the twentieth century.

  Japan’s fifty years of language spread can be seen as a demonstration in miniature of the career of an imperial language. Like the other colonial empires, Japan took advantage of its technical and military superiority over other countries—in this case, its close neighbours—to increase its territory. It then faced the problem of what to do with the native populations there, people who did not think of themselves as Japanese. It attempted everywhere to convert them into members of its own community, certainly not trusting them to associate themselves voluntarily, but setting considerable store by education in the Japanese language. As everywhere else, this conversion process failed.

  There was reasonable success in spreading the language, but once the political motive for using it was gone, the language turned out to have no independent staying power. The framework suggested to explain the decline of Russian can be applied here too. The creole motive was absent, since essentially the whole overseas population had been repatriated. There was no nostalgia for life under the flag of the Rising Sun, nor any wish to preserve unity with its speakers. Indeed, the bitter memories that the few years of Japan’s control had caused were such that even when there were globalisation reasons to renew economic links through the language, they were disregarded. Permanent language spread, it turns out, is not to be achieved through planning, or naked force.

  * Camões is the doyen of Portuguese literature, and his great work celebrates the achievements of the Portuguese mariners. The name Lusiadas, although it recalls ‘Iliad’, is actually a learned equivalent for ‘the Portuguese’, meaning the progeny of Lusus, the mythical founder of the race who lived in (Roman) Lusitania. The work was actually written, for the most part, in Goa, so it is a product of Ultramar, as well as a celebration of it. It was published in 1572.

  * ‘Father, what has brought you to this land so far from India?’ Reported in his Itinerario da Índia por terra, quoted in Lopes (1936: 33-5).

  † Now Bandar Khomeini, on the Straits of Hormuz.

  * It became the default European language in the Indies, and apparently in western Java, in the region of Preanger, even Dutch was known popularly as basa Perteges—an interesting conflation of language misnomers, with basa, through Malay bahasa, from Sanskrit bhā⋅ā, and Perteges a corruption of Portugues (reported in Lopes 1936: viii).

  * To compare with English dialects, Indo-Portuguese makes it like the E in a refined Scots pronunciation of ‘Edinburgh’, standard Portuguese more like the a in Cockney ‘mate’.

  † Even so, in 2000 the state’s official language was declared to be Konkani, an Aryan language related to Marathi and Hindi.

  * This was part of the global impact of the Enlightenment on Catholic governments (see Chapter 10, ‘The state’s solution: Hispanización’, p. 374).

  * Palembang in Sumatra was the principal city of Śrī Vijaya, the ancient state that was most likely responsible for the spread of Malay round the markets of the East Indies. This proverbial statement of wasted effort is said to refer to a failed Dutch attempt to take Palembang, in their day a prime source of pepper (Hamilton 1987: 60).

  * Each country had between 1.25 and 1.5 million people in the seventeenth century (Boxer 1969: 114).

  * The Batavi were a Germanic tribe who had lived in the area of modern Holland, north of the Scheldt, around the turn of the first centuries BC-AD. They thus provided a useful classical pseudonym for historically minded Dutchmen, perhaps little appreciated by the Javanese among whom they settled.

  † A major motive was the association of the Portuguese with Christianity, which the Japanese government of Tokugawa Iemitsu was determined to stamp out within their shores. The Dutch, prepared to restrict their concerns to secular matters of trade, were therefore the only foreign contact of the Japanese for the following two centuries.

  This led to a famous linguistic incident in Japanese history (comparable to the use of Portuguese mentioned above, [’An Asian empire’, p. 388]). In 1853, when the American Commodore Perry entered the port of Uraga with his ‘black ships’, determined to end Japan’s isolation, one of the first Japanese to come alongside, Hori Tatsunosuke, said in very good English, ‘I can speak Dutch.’ Since one of the Americans, a Mr Portman, also knew the language, the first sustained exchange between an American and a Japanese actually took place in Dutch. (Hawks 1954, pp. 48-9)

  * They originally stepped in to take pre-emptive control of Dutch possessions when revolutionary France occupied the Netherlands in 1795, but permanently annexed the Cape colony in 1806.

  * Anderson (1991: 110) suggests two other motives: the absence of nationalism as such in the early seventeenth century (the VOC was after all a corporation, not a nationality), and Dutch lack of self-confidence in their own language. Neither seems particularly convincing, especially in comparison with the Portuguese competitors whom the Dutch were quite consciously outdoing. On p. 133, he suggests further that the Netherlands, with only one substantial colony, could afford to adopt a non-European language for administration: it would have been unworkable, he says, for a multi-continental empire such as the British. But the Dutch empire too, for its first 150 years, had been just as multi-continental.

  On the other hand, he may be right in pointing (p. 110) to the language policy as a means of keeping the native population underdeveloped: ‘in 1940, when the indigenous population numbered well over 70 millions, there were only 637 “natives” in college, and only 37 graduated with BAs.’

  * The Italian Pigafetta, accompanying the Spanish circumnavigators in 1521, had been able to compile a list of 450 Malay words at Tidore in the Moluccas. Nevertheless, it was not yet well established there: ‘even the scribes who had to write it for the infant Sultan of Tidore in 1521 and 1522 showed that they were “certainly very imperfectly acquainted with it’” (Hoffman 1979: 66-7, n. 9).

  * There was always speculation that the strange unwillingness of the Dutch to share their language with their colonial subjects was a sort of snobbery, to enhance their prestige among the Dutchless natives. This was roundly discouraged by the Dutch administration as a harmful attitude. Nevertheless, it was widely believed by foreign observers (e.g. Bousquet 1940: 88-9); and it did happen to fit in with a certain aspect of Javanese etiquette, whereby social status was marked by styles of language (taalsoorten).

  * It might even be seen, by an unsympathetic Anglo-Saxon, as an example of ‘that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit’, a phrase of Peter Medawar in a review of Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phénomène humain (accessible at ).

  * The term was invented by the geographer Onésime Reclus in 1880, to refer to the French-speaking community in the world. Nowadays, at least in the French-speaking world, it refers preferably to a voluntary association of states under a charter, not all of them ex-colonies of France, in spirit rather comparable with the British Commonwealth. (See .)

  † These figures are from Grimes (2000). The French Foreign Ministry’s francophonie website claims that there are 160 million first-language and second-language speakers. Leclerc (2000) states that 145 million people have been to school in French. Either figure might lift its rank above German, but not to the level of Portuguese.

  * Je is a remnant of what was once a Latin pronoun
of emphasis, ego (brutally reduced, after changing to something like eieu—cf. the Provençal equivalent, eu, ieu).

  * There will be more to say of this retreat of French, from the viewpoint of the language that benefited from it, in the next chapter.

  † The term, and the institution, continued in the Mediterranean until the nineteenth century, but the actual language used was based not on French but Italian, probably because of the later influence of merchants from Venice.

  § Eleanor (Aliénor) of Aquitaine (1122-1204) played a cardinal role as a cultural sponsor. She could hardly have been better connected in society, being the wife of two kings, mother of two, and the mother-in-law of yet two more. But in the mid-twelfth century she made her court at Poitiers a centre for courtly love poetry and historical narrative.

  * It has continued to enjoy the sponsorship of the highest level in French government ever since, broken only during the Revolution in 1793-1803. Its first task was to compile a dictionary; the first edition took almost sixty years, coming out in 1694, but it has been updated periodically ever since, the latest edition, the eighth, appearing in 1992.

  * Hence the bon mot of Antoine de Rivarol, in his Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française, of 1784: ’Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français!’ (’What is not clear is not French!’),

  † ’Eh bien, mon prince, Gěnes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des, de la famille Buonaparte. Non. je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas, que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’ y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n’ětes plus mon ami, vous n’ětes plus, comme vous dites.’

  * In the eighteenth century, it yielded only to Spain; in the twentieth, only to Britain.

  * Estimates of the French-speaking population of Algeria vary from the Ethnologue’s almost absurdly low 110,000 (out of a population of 30 million) to 25 per cent of the population (i.e. 7.5 million). Many believe that it is still the second-largest francophone population in the world, ahead of Quebec with 6.7 million, and Belgium with 4 million. (These latter figures also come from the Ethnologue—Grimes 2000.) It is widely believed that the Algerian government’s attempted ‘arabisation’ since 1962 has perversely increased use of other languages, notably Berber and French; but no survey data is available.

  † One village he visited near Quebec City was known as ganāda, ‘settlement’ in the Huron language, which served as lingua franca along the river. This is the origin of the name Canada.

  * The mission flourished, although it did not lead to any French settlement at the time; indeed, de Rhodes was the only Frenchman in a Jesuit team consisting of six Europeans and a Japanese.

  However, the need to protect the missions was later used to justify the massive French invasion of Indo-china which came in 1859. And de Rhodes himself is significant as the man who devised the script now known as Quôc-ngu (, ‘National Language’), using Roman letters and accents. He had designed it as an aid to foreign missionaries learning Vietnamese. But in the late nineteenth century it was taken up, even by nationalists, as the key to mass literacy, and is now used universally in Vietnam.

  * The poor Acadians were to fall victim to great power politics, their lands traded to England under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 in return for trading concessions in India. They were subsequently scattered along the coast, especially in Maine and the mouths of the Mississippi (where they became known as ‘Cajuns’), some in the Antilles and many back to the maritime provinces. Wherever they went, French-speaking communities sprang up, at least for a time.

  * This can hardly have been a fundamental cause, since two decades later it was French naval power which crucially denied the British access to America when they were trying to hold on to their own colonies.

  † The French had the satisfaction of providing Versailles as the site for the 1783 conference that divested Britain of its American colonies, just twenty years after the Paris conference when the British had taken Nouvelle-France from them.

  § These figures are drawn from a French source, Leclerc (2001,
  * Cayenne was founded in 1643 and with Caribbean sugar aplenty had been part of Colbert’s plans for systematic colonisation. It was briefly used after the French Revolution as a place of exile for political prisoners (1794-1805). It never recovered economically from France’s abolition of slavery in 1848, and thereafter was famous mainly for its prison camp, Devil’s Island, in operation from 1852 to 1946.

  † By a happy coincidence, during the reign of Napoleon III, 1852-70, the regime was even known as le second Empire.

  * The Belgians, relying much more on foreign expertise to run their empire, also made less use of French as a pervasive language of administration. As in the British colonies, there was widespread use of any pre-existing lingua franca, notably Swahili and Lingala.

  * Article 2 of the constitution: ’la langue de la République est le français’. This is then given effect by the law of 4 August 1994, ’la langue de l’ enseignement est le français’ (implemented in article L. 121-3 of the Code de l’Éducation).

  † In our Romanisation of Russian, y has the value of English y in yet (often attached as a superscript to a consonant, showing that it is palatalised); ï represents a vowel not known in standard English: it is like the vowel i with the body of the tongue drawn back, which can be heard for instance in the Scottish pronunciation of the word dirk; ë, as in Cyrillic spelling, is pronounced yo as in ‘yob’. The acute accent, ’, marks a heavy stress, and o when it is not stressed sounds more like a. In older Russian, the letter is transcribed ė, since it seems to have represented a more closed e sound, like E in the local pronunciation of ‘Edinburgh’, or é in French été.

  * The name is a Latinisation of Rusy, first heard of in the ninth century. Its origins are obscure (and discussed in Franklin and Shepard 1996: 27-32). But the Finnish name for Swedes is Ruotsi (perhaps originally meaning ‘oarsmen’); and the first recorded use of the term (as Rhōs, through Greek) is the Bertinian Annals’ account of a visit to a Frankish court in 839, of ‘certain men who said they were called Rhos, and that their king, known as chacanus [i.e. khagan - a Turkic title!] had despatched them… The Emperor [Louis—he of the Strasburg Oaths; see Chapter 8]… discovered that they were Swedes by origin.’ But a contemporary source, the Arabic Book of Routes and Kingdoms (c.846), tells us: ‘The Rūs are a tribe of Slavs. They bring furs of beavers and black foxes…’ (Milner-Gulland 1997: 53-5). There is also a small river called the Rosy, which flows into the Dnieper just south of Kiev.

  * The Russian for Orthodox, pravoslavnïi, is a loan translation from the Greek. But tellingly, this word could as well be analysed to mean ‘truly Slav’ or indeed ‘rightly glorious’.

  † Barraclough (1978: 209, 230). In the early twentieth century there were substantial flows into Turkestan too, sometimes provoking large-scale departures of the locals eastward into China (Hosking 1997: 389-90). Later on, especially under Stalin, these flows were augmented by deliberate enforced deportations en masse, ostensibly for security, reminiscent of Tiglath Pileser and his successors in the Assyrian empire (see Chapter 3, ‘Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy’, p. 64). But the populations then deported into Kazakhstan and Siberia typically spoke languages other than Russian: 200,000 Turkic-speaking Tatars from the Crimea, 1.8 million Germans from the Volga. Some, like the Chechen-Ingush, Kabard-Balkar and Kalmyk, were later allowed to return. But there are even now 300,000 Koreans in modern Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (Dalby 1998: 616, 223, 329; Comrie 1981: 30).

  * Compare what happens to t and d in British English before long u: the words tune and dune are pronounced [tyūn] and [dyūn] in careful speech, but affricated to [tšūn] and [dzucar
;ūn] in everyday pronunciation.

  * A Varangian fortress on the strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea: evidently the falcons were trying to beat a path far to the east of Kiev.

  * The old title knyazy, ‘prince’, is likewise a borrowing of a Western term: it is the Russian reworking of the old Germanic title kuningas, literally ‘man of birth’, which is also the origin of English king.

  † Kozak (in Crimean Tatar, Chagatay Turkic) means ‘free man, wanderer, bandit’. In other Turkic languages (e.g. Kïrgïz, Azeri, Bashkir) the word kazak, qazaq has meanings such as ‘independent man’ or ‘seeker of adventures’. All are derived from old the Turkic verb kez-, ‘walk, wander, travel’.

  * These of course were not the only Slavic-language groups of central Europe. But the others, among them the Wends, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians, Serbs, Bosnians and Croats, were never available for incorporation into early modern Russia. Their languages, like Polish, were not mutually intelligible with Russian; and their peoples were firmly held within the bounds of other empires.

  * In the census of 1897, the Ukrainians would constitute 18 per cent, the rest of the Russians 44 per cent.