Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  …

  This question they often put to me: ‘Why come the Englishmen hither?’ and measuring others by themselves, they say, ‘It is because you want firing.’ For they, having burnt up the wood in one place, wanting draughts to bring wood to them, are fain to follow the wood, and so remove to a fresh place for the wood’s sake.

  Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, 164320

  The growth of English in the Caribbean had been achieved with little friction. Very few of the Arawak or Carib population had survived the Spanish takeover of the sixteenth century, and so the English pirates and planters, and the slaves that they imported, were entering an emptied domain. The situation on the North American mainland was very different.

  In Virginia and Massachusetts, the first bridgeheads for English settlers, there was still a substantial indigenous population. What with visiting cod fishermen and other scouting voyagers, they were already to some extent familiar with Europeans.* This was lucky for the settlers, since in both places it was only through the active help of these knowledgeable neighbours that they survived those first years. In Virginia, John Rolfe, who founded the cultivation of tobacco in Virginia, married in 1612 none other than Pocahontas, the spirited daughter of the Powhatan chief Wahunsonacock.† This kept relations with the Powhatan sweet until 1622; in 1616 the couple had even led a party of Virginians to London, where they were presented to King James I. In Massachusetts, the colonists were helped crucially in the first few years by two bilingual natives, Samoset, who had learnt some English from cod fishermen, and Tisquantum. Tisquantum was quite fluent in English, having crossed the Atlantic already six times, spending nine years in England, four in Spain and a further year mapping the New England coast, returning home just a year before the arrival of the English settlers in November 1620.

  The task facing the English colonists was quite comparable to the challenge to Cortés and the Spaniards who had invaded Mexico just a century before, to establish themselves, as masters, in the midst of someone else’s country. But English motives for being in America were rather different. They were not looking for gold, converts or even dominion. Rather, they were looking for land. This prospect had been the chief inducement for volunteers, ever since Humphrey Gilbert’s prospectus for the first failed expedition of 1583. For Englishmen, the intent to create a ‘New England’ was quite literal, and many showed their earnest by bringing wives and small children out with them.

  Since they had no interest in the inhabitants, except as untrusted and expendable helpmeets, it was of little concern to them that there was no major overlord fit for conquest in the part of America into which they had projected themselves, nor that—as it happened—the language spoken by the first inhabitants they met was actually very widespread there and far beyond: they were more struck by the fact that the language as they encountered it was highly riven dialectally, which meant that even those few who made the effort to learn to speak it could scarcely be understood when they wandered farther afield:

  I once travelled to an island of the wildest in our parts … I was alone having travelled from my bark, the wind being contrary; and little could I speak to them to their understanding, especially because of the change of their dialect and manner of speech; yet much, through the help of God, did I speak … that at my parting, many burst forth, ‘Oh, when will you come again, to bring us some more news of this God?’

  …

  Anum; a dog … the variety of their dialects and proper speech, within thirty or forty miles of each other, is very great, as appears in that word: Anum, the Cowweset dialect; Ayim, the Narroganset; Arum the Quunnipicuck; Alum, the Neepmuck.21

  Unknown to anyone at the time, members of the linguistic family in fact extended in two almost unbroken strips for 2500 kilometres, across the central and northern reaches of the continent as far as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, from Powhatan to Shawnee to Miami to Illinois to Arapaho to Cheyenne, and from Massachusett to Abenaki to Algonquin† to Ojibwa to Menominee to Cree to Blackfoot. In between Powhatan and Massachusett lay speakers of another related language, Lenape. These languages were very different from English, highly polysyllabic in their words, and with profusions of prefixes and suffixes. But they were fairly similar to each other, as a few animal names show: ‘moose’ is Abenaki mos, Miami moswa, Ojibwa mōns, Menominee mōs; ‘seal’ is Abenaki àhkikw, Ojibwa āskik, Cree āhkik; ‘bison’ is Abenaki pēsihkó or wēihko, Menominee pesοPhkiw, Ojibwa pišikki, Cree pisihkiw; and ‘bobwhite’, a species of small bird (Colinus virginianus), is Lenape pōhpōhkēs, and Miami pohposisia. In the Massachusett translation of the Bible, the word for ‘quails’ is poohpoohqu-tteh.22 It is revealing that only in one of these four examples was the Indian word actually borrowed into English: the settlers had never seen a pēsihkó before, but they still preferred to stick with their own linguistic world, and name it for something similar that they did know.

  The settlers’ attitude to the Indians was to attempt to coexist peacefully until they needed to dispossess them to provide more land for their expanding community. There was little or no cohabitation, but hostilities followed sooner or later; and the natives of New England in the end died out far more thoroughly and rapidly than those of Mexico or Peru. Nevertheless, the English never undertook to subjugate the whole country militarily, as the Spanish did immediately in any new territory that they explored. As a result, the British authorities never felt responsible for the Indians in the way that the Spanish did; and there was far less effort to convert them. It was only an exceptional Englishman who endeavoured to reach the natives spiritually, or was concerned to try to build solidarity with them. Two such were the Cambridge graduates Roger Williams (16037-83) and John Eliot (1604-90), who learnt their local language, and published books about it: Williams ‘A Key into the Language of America’, and Eliot ‘The Indian Grammar Begun, or an Essay to bring the Indian Language into Rules, for the help of such as desire to learn the same, for the furtherance of the Gospel among them’.23 Williams was more a political activist, expelled from Massachusetts for his views, and also acting as negotiator for the Narragansetts during hostilities; his ‘Key’ is full of observations on how the natural behaviour of the natives is often at least as good as that of declared Christians. Eliot was more a missionary. Since 1646 he had preached in Massachusett, and translated the whole Bible into it by 1663.24 Within thirty years there was a ring of towns round about Boston, inhabited by ‘Praying Indians’. But in the next generation, when the London-based Corporation for Propagating the Gospel suggested printing a new edition, it was effectively resisted by the colonial authorities. A Puritan divine wrote back:

  The Indians themselves are Divided in their Desires upon this matter. Though some of their aged men are tenacious enough of Indianisme (which is not at all to be wondred at) Others of them as earnestly wish that their people may be made English as fast as they can. The reasons they assign for it are very weighty ones; and this among the rest, That their Indian Tongue is a very penurious one (though the Words are long enough!) and the great things of our Holy Religion brought unto them in it, unavoidably arrive in Terms that are scarcely more intelligible to them than if they were entirely English. But the English tongue would presently give them a Key to all our Treasures and make them the Masters of another sort of Library than any that ever will be seen in their Barbarous Linguo …25

  By then, Massachusett speakers would already have been few: their principal tribes had been all but destroyed in ‘King Philip’s War’ (1675-6), the last act of resistance by the Massachusett Indians to white expansion, and the Praying Indians were particularly hard hit, having gained no reward from their loyalty to the whites but a two-year deportation to Deer Island, barren and cold, in Boston harbour.

  The Virginia, Massachusetts (and Connecticut) colonies were joined in 1670 by a fourth, the Carolina colony, set up by eight English lords under a charter from King Charles II. It had originally had the exotic purpose to subsi
st on silk farming, but eventually reconciled itself to cultivation of rice and indigo.

  Manifest destiny

  Texas is now ours. Already, before these words are written, her Convention has undoubtedly ratified the acceptance, by her Congress, of our proffered invitation into the Union; … other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions … It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretence that the Annexation has been a measure of spoliation, unrightful and unrighteous—military conquest under forms of peace and law—territorial aggrandizement at the expense of justice, and justice due by a double sanctity to the weak. This view of the question is wholly unfounded …

  John L. Sullivan, United States Magazine and Democratic Review, vol. 17, July/August 1845

  So the English settlers established themselves in farming communities on the eastern coast of North America. The next challenge came less from the indigenous peoples than from fellow Europeans. In the seventeenth century, the English did not have the eastern seaboard to themselves, but had to share it with colonists from France to the north, and Spain in Florida to the south (see map on p. 413). Even the centre was not uncontested, since there were Dutch and even Swedish territories intervening between Britain’s Massachusetts and Virginia plantations. In all these cases, the field was cleared by wars in the mother country’s strategic interests. The Dutch were expelled fairly briskly from Nieuw Nederland (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the southern half of New York State*) in 1664, and the French, after a century of wars, from Nouvelle-France (eastern Canada), and Louisiane east of the Mississippi, in 1763. Britain also briefly acquired title to Florida from Spain, in exchange for Havana, which it had captured in 1762; it lost it again after the war of 1812. These were the proceeds of global struggles between the European powers, but nonetheless they opened the territories up to settlement by speakers of English.

  The next major event was the war from 1775 to 1783 in which the English-speaking colonies made themselves independent of their home government in London, the ‘American Revolution’ which created the USA. This was highly significant politically, in that it formed an autonomous source of expansion for the English colonies in the continent; henceforth the chief English-speaking power in North America was a state ‘with a built-in empire’,26 and, as it transpired, a western frontier that constantly receded until it reached the Pacific coastline. The federal form of government that was devised in 1777 turned out to be well suited to this new empire with dynamic borders, as new acquisitions progressed from territorial status to statehood.* But it also had immediate linguistic effects outside the USA. Many who could not accept the new dispensation decamped northward to Canada, and so created a significant English-speaking community in Ontario. In the following century, this was to attract one of the main streams of immigration into North America, thereby boosting its English-speaking population quite independently of the USA.

  By 1783, less than two centuries after the first English colony at Roanoke, English was the official language of every settlement in the east of North America. At that point, three-quarters of what is now the continental USA (’the lower 48’) was still under the nominal control of foreign powers, France, Spain and—north-west in the Oregon territory—Great Britain. But in the lapse of two generations, by 1853, the whole area was taken by the USA.* Furthermore, by 1890 settlers had set up cities and farms in every part of the area. North of the Rio Grande and Gila rivers there was nowhere left for a significant, independent, language community to flourish.

  It had all happened so easily, in just a few major constitutional gulps. President Thomas Jefferson took advantage of the brief supremacy of Napoleon in France to purchase the remaining extent of the French Americas, la Louisiane, in 1803; this alone doubled the area of the USA. The next two presidents, James Madison and James Monroe, annexed Florida from Spain, ratifying the deed in 1821; it turned out to be harder to detach Seminole Indians than the Spanish, and the wars with them, begun in 1817, lasted until 1842. Most of the rest of the country was taken during the administration of a single president, James Knox Polk. In 1845 he accepted the accession of Texas, which had detached itself from Mexico—itself newly independent of Spain. In 1846 he split the difference with Britain to end a long wrangle over ownership of the Oregon country, and so created the present western border between the USA and Canada at the 49th parallel. The annexation of Texas, and imposition of war reparations, led to war with Mexico: the USA promptly won it, taking Mexico City in the process, but in 1848 declared itself content to absorb California and the rest of the west.27 It might have held out for the whole of the rest of Mexico, but eventually decided it was too heavily populated with foreigners. As Senator John J. Calhoun opined—in amazing defiance of two centuries of American history: ‘To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of … incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours … is the Government of a white race.’28

  All the lands that had been gained in this rapid onset had of course long been populated, though hardly at all by the European powers from whom they were acquired. The people who had been there—some two hundred separate language communities in English-language America, and over fifty in California alone—found that contact with the settlers followed a fairly predictable course. In the first instance, before they even appeared, mysterious and deadly diseases would beset the tribe. Then, when the white man came to meet them in person, there would be an attempt at conciliation, which might lead to a treaty as between independent nations, the United States (or His Majesty’s) Government and the tribe, which would designate boundaries, and mutual obligations. There might be as much as a generation of peaceful coexistence; but later, as more and more white people arrived, and began to encroach on tribal land, the tribes would find that the white men’s willingness to enforce the agreement against their own people was highly limited; the tribes would find their territories violated, and their livelihoods destroyed. This might mean war, but ultimately the tribes would always lose it. There were just too many whites, and they were far better armed. All too often, the final stage was a unilateral action by the white men to confine or deport the tribes to a reservation, which might be thousands of miles away. This was the English way with the natives of America, and it was repeated over and over again.

  It was essentially an exercise in distancing and exclusion. Although US law recognised the tribes as distinct nations, there was no plan to accommodate them or to integrate them as such within the constitution of the republic. Rather, if there was a plan, it was for their members, individually or as families, to become citizens and householders of the republic. Thomas L. McKenney, in charge of Indian affairs from 1816, claimed: ‘We want to make citizens out of them’; and part of the process lay in changing their language to English, ‘the lever by which they are to elevate themselves into intellectual and moral distinction’.29 On 3 March 1819 the US Congress passed an act to give education to provide ‘against further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes… to instruct them in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation, and for teaching their children in reading, writing and arithmetic’. Expenditure increased from $10,000 in 1819 to $214,000 in 1842, when there were thirty-seven schools and eighty-five teachers. Rule 41 of the Reservation Boarding Schools (1881) read: ‘All instruction must be in the English language. Pupils must be compelled to speak with each other in English, and should be properly rebuked or punished for persistent violation of this rule. Every effort should be made to encourage them to abandon their tribal language.’30

  The official in
tent to eliminate the ancestral peoples of North America as separate entities has not, ultimately, been fulfilled. Indeed, the population pendulum is at last swinging back. In 1999 the indigenous population of the USA (American Indian, Eskimo and Aleut) was estimated as 2.4 million, up from 1.4 million in 1980. As a percentage of the total population, this represents a recovery from 0.6 per cent to just under 1 per cent.31 But viewed as a means for spreading English, the official policies must be seen as having been effective, and far harder to reverse than a sheer loss of numbers. By now, passive knowledge of English is almost universal. Furthermore, census figures show that by 1990 fewer than a quarter of American Indians were speaking any language but English at home. Even where native language use was holding up best, on the Navajo reservation in the south-west, the number of those among the school-age population speaking only English went up, in this same period of growing Indian numbers, from 11.8 per cent in 1980 to 28.4 per cent in 1990.32 Now it is reported that fewer than half of Navajo children still speak the language.33 In the present situation, the prospect for long-term survival of any of North America’s own languages, even in coexistence with English, seems very bleak.