Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (20 page)

Nevertheless, it remains in many ways characteristically Bantu, with lots of nasals before stops (-nd-, -ng-, -mb-, -nt-, -nk-, -mp-), a variety of special prefixes that show what type of concept is designated by a noun, and heavy agglutinative prefixing on its verbs, doing most of the work that would be done by pronouns, verb inflexions and auxiliaries in languages like English, or indeed Arabic: for example,

The reckoning is that the spread of Bantu languages from the Great Lakes region would have reached the Zanzibar
^*
area early in this millennium, so that an early version of the language may well have been learnt by the Arab visitors mentioned in the
Períplous.
When Europeans first arrived on the scene (the Portuguese in 1498), Swahili was spoken in a thin strip all along the coast from Mogadishu in Somalia to Beira in Mozambique. The oldest surviving Arabic inscription in the region is from a mosque built in 1107, and it is clear that Arabic was much used as a trade language here, often in mixtures with other languages that have since died out. There may also have been influence in the opposite direction: it is said that some coastal dialects of Arabic in Arabia and Iraq show signs of Swahili influence.
⁷⁹

Be this as it may, Swahili is now the official language in the states of Tanzania and Kenya, and widely used in the neighbouring countries of Uganda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congos, Madagascar and the Comoros. Since the advent of European colonists, it has played a major role as a lingua franca of empires, as well as a less honourable one as the argot of slave-traders and their victims. Despite the vast numbers who use it (estimated at 40 million), Swahili is learnt as a native language only on the islands and coast close to Zanzibar. Perhaps as always, the vast majority of its speakers (some 90 per cent) pick it up later in life. Without Arab trade there would have been no Swahili as we know it, but Arabic influence on it ceased long ago.

Two other major languages, Turkic (spoken in a variety of forms, but all fairly close to modern Turkish) and Persian, are now best known as the auxiliary languages of Islamic civilisation. We have had to give them walk-on roles in the history of Arabic, but unjustly: both have interesting histories which go back for a thousand years before their speakers’ fateful conversions to Islam, and have contributed equally to their characters today and in the past.

The Turkic languages spread out over a vast area from western Mongolia to the Aegean Sea. As Xiongnu and Tabgatch, their speakers had harried and overrun the Chinese in the third and fourth centuries AD; in the fifth they were terrorising northern India as the Hū
a, and eastern Europe as Hunni. In 451 they even briefly rode to France with Attila. Khazars ruled the south of Russia from the Black Sea to the Caspian from the sixth century to the eleventh. Turkic-speaking recruits made up the majority of the armies of Genghis Khan the Mongol in the early thirteenth century, and as members of the Golden Horde it was they who sacked Kiev in 1240, permanently shifting the centre of Russian power. (See Chapter 11, ‘The origins of Russian’, p. 426.) Other Turks, the Seljuks and later the Ottomans, brought down the Byzantine Greeks, and settled all over Anatolia, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, the Turkic-speaking Tatars in Kazan’ and Astrakhan were still seen by the Russians as the major obstacle to their expansion, one that now needed to be dislodged; and in the eighteenth century it was the Tatars in the Crimea who were very much in the Russians’ way.

In the eighth and ninth centuries, Turks were writing funeral inscriptions in the Orkhon valley in Outer Mongolia in a runic alphabet of their own devising. Then they took up Sogdian writing, converting it into the vertical Uighur script of central Asia. In the eleventh century they encountered the Persians, and adopted Arabic script from them, even writing a dictionary of their language and a long didactic poem, the
Kutadğū Bilig
, ‘The Knowledge of Auspiciousness’. In fourteenth-century Persia and Samarkand, the form of Turkic known as Chagatay—after the second son of Genghis Khan—was the language of culture in courts of the Mongolian khans,
⁸⁰
and when Babur, the first of the Mughals, swept down from Afghanistan to conquer India in 1505, this was the language he spoke to his men, even if he preferred to write in Persian.
⁸¹

It would almost be fair to take Babur’s approach as the spirit of Ottoman Turkish up to the twentieth century. Official Turkish was always heavily infused with literary Persian finery until Atatürk’s attempts to reform it in the 1930s.
⁸²

If Turkish deserves its own treatment, So does its cultural big sister, Persian, or
Farsī
, a highly literate language since the sixth century BC. TO this day, untutored Westerners tend to see Persia as rather an indistinct eastern part of the Arab world: yet Persian—as a language—has far more in common with languages of Europe or northern India than it does with Arabic or Turkish. Despite 1200 years of practice, the phonetic distinctions in Arabic which Westerners find hard to master,
s, z, t, d
versus
,
,
,
, and ’(alif) versus ’ (’ayn), are difficult for Persian speakers too. The Persian word for ‘is’ is still
ast
, like Latin
est
, German
ist
, Russian
yest
y and Sanskrit
asti.

Although it is has never ceased to be spoken in Iran over the last two thousand years, culturally it has been unfortunate, overlaid and disadvantaged by a series of political setbacks. First, in the sixth century BC Darius decided to make Aramaic the official language of the Persian empire; in the fourth century BC, when the empire was conquered, the Seleucids tried to impose Greek. Parthians and Sassanids reasserted its self-esteem for eight centuries from 140 BC, but then came the phenomenal spread of Islamic forces in the seventh century AD, elevating Arabic into a privileged position in religion, scholarship and government for three centuries. ‘No assistance should be sought from pagans in office work,’ scribes were enjoined.
⁸³

A resurgence of Persian began in the tenth century, but it was overlaid almost at once by the Turkic-speaking (nominally Mongol) incursions in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Nevertheless, Persian remained a prestige language; and thanks to Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals who followed, Persian also became the principal official language of Indian administration, from the thirteenth century until it yielded to English in the nineteenth.

Persian’s relatives have also been highly significant in central Asia. Scythian had been spoken across most of the Eurasian steppes in the first millennium BC. (It survives as Ossetic, a language of the Caucasus.) In the first millennium AD, Śaka-Khotanese was an important cultural language of early Buddhism; and Bactrian, spoken farther west, was taken by the Kushāna kings across northern India in the first and second centuries AD. Sogdian, centred on Samarkand, was the lingua franca of the Silk Road to China in the eighth to the tenth centuries. (It survives as Yaghnobi, still spoken in the Pamir mountains.)

For all its ups and downs, Persian is still spoken beyond the borders of Iran in the northern half of Afghanistan (as
Darī
, ‘courtly’), and beyond that in Tajikistan (as
Tajik
). And despite its speakers’ frequent lack of political dominance even in their own lands, wherever it is known it has always remained a language of high cultural prestige, famed particularly for its poetry.