Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (78 page)

In Peru, attitudes to the
lengua general
were more complex. Quechua, like Nahuatl, was widely used to preach the gospel, and at the same time became the vehicle for a nostalgic literature harking back to life before the conquest. But it was also taken up by the
criollo
landowning class, not themselves descendants of Indians, as a symbol of local legitimacy: at once it distinguished them from the Spanish-speaking urban elite in Lima, but also denied the country people a linguistic means to keep their landlords at a distance. Nevertheless, over the two and a half centuries after the conquest, Quechua came increasingly to represent the dissatisfaction of the Peruvian peasants; this exploded into open uprisings in the last half-century, culminating in the general rebellion in 1780 under the self-styled Tupac Amaru II (’Royal Serpent’). It is said that, before the rebellion was crushed, the drama
Ollantay
had been staged before the leaders. This is known as the finest work of the Quechua theatre, and tells the tormented love story of an Inca princess and a warrior commoner, in the heyday of the great Incas Pachacutec and Tupac Yupanqui (mid-fifteenth century). Here is the section where the Inca, somewhat abruptly, shows the quality of his mercy.

Aymara, continuing to be spoken in the south of Peru and in what is now Bolivia (then the
Audiencia
of Charcas), underwent a kind of transfusion of vocabulary with Spanish: the many loans from Spanish were mostly for new Christian, or Western, ideas, but in some cases they were adapted to express traditional concepts:
Wirjina
(from Spanish
virgen
) and
Santa Tira
(from Spanish
Santa Tierra
, ‘holy land’) both came to stand for the Earth Mother (in Quechua
Pachamama).
In many other cases, Aymara words came to have Christian senses, as
jucha
, ‘sin’, in this short extract from an eighteenth-century sermon, where the Spanish borrowings are marked in bold:

Guaraní is the only indigenous American language that ultimately achieved permanent recognition as an official national language. Partly, the low penetration of Spanish in the early years may be due to the extreme remoteness of the Guaraní-speaking areas in the Americas, and the resulting lack of Spanish-speaking women to found Spanish-speaking families there. But the language mostly owes its resilience to the exemplary settlement by Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Their
reducciones
, communities founded as a holy and philanthropic reaction to the oppressive system of
encomiendas
^*
around Asunción, dominated relations between European and Indian in the period 1609-1767. The work was disrupted by raiding slavers (the dreaded
’mamelucos’
) in 1628-40, and persistently by
encomenderos.
In the
reducciones
, all teaching was carried out in Guaraní, and the language thereby gained a very strong basis in Christianised culture. The utopian nature of the world so created by the Jesuits can be seen in the literal meaning of some of the new words that became current:
îbîrayararusú
, ‘master of the big stick’, i.e. chief constable;
kuarepotí
, ‘excrement of the mines’, i.e. money (something that had no use in the
reducciones
).,
⁴⁵

An explicit motive in the Jesuits’ language regime was to protect Indians from European vices. But cultivation of the decent obscurity of a classical language, specifically Latin, was a policy widely pursued by the learned friars in the Americas, not least because they were aiming to found a native priesthood there. Some of the friars became enchanted by the achievements of their pupils in classical learning. Fray Toribio Motolinía, one of the twelve original Franciscan missionaries to Mexico, preserves this anecdote of the collapse of a stout party from Castile:

In some places, the Spanish spread the
lenguas generales
beyond the range of the pre-Columbian empires that had created them. Under the Spanish, and with the aid of their Nahuatl-speaking allies, notably from Tlaxcallan, who were only too happy to dispossess the Aztecs, Nahuatl spread down into Guatemala, which had hitherto been a preserve of Mayan speakers. This is why so many Guatemalan place names are actually of Nahuatl origin: the name of the beautiful Lake Atitlán means ‘round the water’, or as they put it in the local Tz’utujil,
chi-nim-ya
’, ‘by the great water’; Guatemala itself is
Quauh-temal-lan
, ‘tree-infection-place’, translating the Mayan expression
k’i-chee’
(still used to refer to the largest language group in the country, traditionally spelt Quiche). A common ending for town names, -tenango, is from…
tenan-co
, ’ in the citadel of … ’ : Quetzaltenango, ’ in the citadel of the quetzal bird’, Huehuetenango, ‘in the old citadel’, Momostenango, ‘in the citadel of the chapel’, Chichicastenango, ‘in the citadel of the bitter nettle’. These all have a decidedly foreign ring today, when Nahuatl is no longer spoken east or south of the isthmus of Tepehuantepec, 500 kilometres away. The Tlaxcalans also took their Nahuatl northward, at least to Zacatecas; and in the west, Nahuatl was used by missionaries to preach to the Tarascans of Michoacán (Nahuatl
Michuahkan
‘place of those who have fish’), which had never been part of the Aztec domains.
⁴⁷

In Peru, the evidence suggests that Quechua had already been spread, whether through the fifteenth-century conquests of Tupac Yupanqui or the travels of Chincha merchants, as far north as the borders of modern Colombia well before the Spanish conquest.
⁴⁸
The Incas had also established some level of economic link with the Tucumán area to their south: there were roads, garrison stations and inns, and perhaps periodic labour corvées (
mit’ a
) of the type familiar in their empire. But the linguistic impact of this is unclear. At any rate, under Spanish tutelage the language was to consolidate its spread southward. There was net migration from Peru south into the Potosí area of modern Bolivia, to support the vast development of silver mining there. Later, Quechua also spread into the provinces of Tucumán, Santiago del Estero and Córdoba of modern Argentina. In all this area, Spanish inroads were accompanied by larger numbers of attendant Peruvians and
mestizos;
and so the linguistic advance of empire tended to be Quechua rather than Spanish. Missionary activity too was a factor, after the Council of Lima in 1582-3, which had set out a general plan for the conversion of the Americas: as everywhere, the friars found it more expeditious to preach in the
lengua general
, and in this period Quechua must still have had some flavour of Inca prestige attached to it.
^*
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tucumán had lost its previous languages, and was essentially a Quechua-speaking region.
⁴⁹

In the middle of the eighteenth century, when Spain had dominated the Americas for fully ten generations, many Spaniards were disappointed in the very much less than universal spread of their language. Rosenblat estimates that in the Spanish colonies in 1810 there were three mother-tongue speakers of an indigenous language for every one who had grown up with Spanish: 9 million rural Indians to 3 million whites, creoles and
mestizos.
⁵¹
The archbishop of Mexico, Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitrón—himself a Spaniard, naturally—took the language question particularly to heart:

In 1769, in a pastoral letter to the archdiocese of Mexico, he proposed the abolition of all indigenous languages through the compulsory use of Spanish. He was a child of his time, the era of the Enlightenment, when the universal benefits to humanity of Reason were being ever more widely appreciated, and new, radical, policies were being proposed to give them effect. Almost as important, he had the ear of the king of Spain, Carlos III. As a result, even though his proposal was rejected by the then viceroy of Mexico, who felt that all that was needed was better enforcement of the existing (two-hundred-year-old) standards for teaching Spanish, and then by the full Council of the Indies, on the even more traditional grounds that the Council of Trent (1545) clearly required the teaching of the gospel in natives’ languages, the king nevertheless ordered and signed the fatal royal
Cédula
of 16 April 1770, whose crucial phrase runs: ‘in order that at once may be achieved the extinction of the different languages used in the said domains, and the sole use of Castilian …’

The decree noted that previous royal commandments for schools in Castilian to be established in all villages had been to little avail. But in fact its only concrete requirement was for bishops to appoint curates henceforth without any concern for their competence in languages other than Spanish. This was directed not just to Mexico, but explicitly to every part of the Spanish empire, including the Philippines.

The decree was followed up in 1782 by a second, which required civil and religious authorities to provide for the funding of masters in Castilian. This did not lead to any wide-scale improvement in the teaching of Spanish in the empire. The gains for Spanish, though real, came about by default, almost as the first royal
Cédula
had imagined: Indians’ use of their own languages was simply wished away, as the Spanish authorities increasingly addressed them in Spanish, willy-nilly. All official support for education in the indigenous languages came to be withdrawn; professorial chairs in the universities were discontinued; books written in them ceased to be published. Courts in Mexico ceased to entertain pleas written in Nahuatl. Furthermore, the same period was seeing a decline in the influence and the power of the Church within the empire, a process generally attributed to the spread of the Enlightenment in Europe, but evidenced most dramatically in the expulsion of the Jesuits from all their
reducciones
in South America in 1767.
^†
The Indians were losing not only the institutional supports for their languages, but also their European protectors, the friars and priests. These trends turned out to be sufficient to bring on the decline of all the
lenguas generales.