Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (81 page)

From this native basis, however, Portuguese spread as a tool of trade and international communication, i.e. as a lingua franca. When Portuguese settlements were so widespread in the accessible spots of the coasts of Africa and Asia, it was inevitable that their business partners and other associates would begin to find that the language they had acquired to facilitate relations with the Portuguese had an extra utility in dealing with others of their partners and associates—who might indeed have no other language in common. In fact, this utility of Portuguese outlived its trading dominance by at least a hundred years, lasting until the eighteenth century, when a Frenchman opined: ‘Merchants of the Hindus, Moors, Arabs, Persians, Parsees, Jews and Armenians who do business with the European factories, as well as black men who wish to work as interpreters, are obliged to speak this language; it serves also as a medium of communication among the European nations settled in India.’
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In 1551 the Englishman Thomas Wyndham, visiting the Gold Coast with a Portuguese companion, Antonio Pinteado, found that they could converse in Portuguese with the king of Benin, who had known it since his childhood.
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In 1600, when Japan received its first ever English visitor, the pilot Will Adams, he was able to communicate only when his surprised host, the
shōgun
Tokugawa Ieyasu, managed to find a Portuguese-speaking interpreter.
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In 1606 Brother Gaspar de San Bernardino, forced by lack of water to land in Persia, was amazed to be addressed by the local military commander: ‘
Padre, quem te trouxe a esta terra tam longe da Índia?’
^*
In 1638, another traveller wrote: ‘Rare are the visitors to Gomron,t though they be for the most part Persians, Arabs and Indians, who do not speak or understand Portuguese, from the trade that they had in earlier years with the Portuguese, who long held the city of Hormuz.’
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A little later, in the mid-seventeenth century, kings of Ceylon, and of Arakan on the other side of the Bay of Bengal (northern Burma), insisted on using Portuguese to correspond with the Dutch—even though the emperor of Kandy, Rajasinha II, was in fact in alliance with them against the Portuguese.
^†

Portuguese soon transformed itself from a lingua franca of use to princes and elite travellers to a more generally understood language of the servant class and (often the same people) early converts to Christianity. In the early days, a few phrases in Portuguese might be all that converts gained. Fernáo Mendes Pinto, on a visit to a city in southern China that he calls Sampitay in the late sixteenth century, encountered a woman dressed in red satin, who inveighed passionately against the evils of long sea voyages, and then pulled up a sleeve to reveal a cross elegantly branded on her arm.

She went on to reveal that she had inherited the faith from her father, who had practised it for twenty-seven years, making over three hundred converts, and that every Sunday they gathered for worship at her house.
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The Dutch, the principal successor power in the region, accepted the linguistic status quo; after 1692 they required arriving chaplains in Madras to learn Portuguese within a year of their arrival as well as the local language of their residence (usually Tamil) ‘in order that they may be able to instruct in Protestant religion the Pagans who are servants or slaves of the Company or its agents’.
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In 1704 the Dutch governor of Ceylon (now Śri Lanka), Cornelius Jan Simonsz, noted that someone speaking Portuguese could be understood anywhere on that island; and in 1807 the Reverend James Cordiner, in his
A description of Ceylon
, wrote that ‘A corruption of their original language is still spoken over all the sea coasts. It is very easily learned, and proves of great utility to a traveller who has not time to study the more difficult dialects of the natives.’
^*

Ironically, one of the strongest citadels of Portuguese was the Dutch power’s own capital in Batavia on the island of Java. To preach the gospel, wrote Jean Brun in 1675, ‘they will acquire Portuguese Bibles and various devotional books in Portuguese and Indian languages and recite the catechism in these languages, because they are understood by most of the Indians… ‘
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In 1708 there was even an appeal by Protestant priests there to the governor-general to maintain exclusive use of Portuguese in some churches, claiming:

But the language was changed by its expansion: it was widely pidginised, and while some Portuguese can still be heard over most of this area to this day, outside Portugal’s most substantial long-term colonies (Angola and Mozambique in Africa, Goa in India) it is in the form of creoles heavily influenced by its local competitor languages. In Indo-Portuguese creoles, for example, still spoken in scattered communities along the Malabar coast of the subcontinent from Daman and Diu in Gujarat to Śri Lanka in the south, the diphthong spelt
ei
, absent in Indian languages, is reduced to a high [ē] vowel, very different from modern Portuguese, where it is pronounced more like [ai].
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The complex inflexions of the language inherited from Latin have been replaced by less involved structures: in Diu, ‘dog’ may still be
cáo
and ‘son’
filho
, but in the plural, instead of
cáes
and
filhos
, we have
cáo-cáo
and
fi-fi;
verbal tenses are likewise analytic,
eu tá vai
, T am going’,
eu já comeu
, ‘I ate’,
eu had vai
, ‘I shall go’, instead of the standard (and irregular)
vou, comi, irei.
In Śri Lanka, they have even absorbed the local (Sinhala and Tamil) use of postpositions:
eu já vi terra por
, ‘I came by land’.
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Similar, transformed, varieties of Portuguese are still spoken in Malacca in Malaysia (where the language is known as Kristang, betraying its old religious overtones, from Portuguese
cristá
, ‘Christian’), in Macao in southern China, and in Timor, on the southernmost edge of the East Indies.

The third, and now most significant, type of spread of Portuguese occurred when it was taken up, essentially unchanged, by a new population. This has happened, but only to a tiny extent, in the African colonies of Angola and Mozambique (where recent estimates
¹¹
put the native-speaking ‘Lusophone’ populations at 57,600 and above 30,000—respectively 0.5 per cent and 0.2 per cent of their populations, even if the same source claims that 27 per cent of Mozambicans know Portuguese as a second language). There is also a small remnant of Portuguese in Goa.
^†
But it has happened triumphantly in what was Portugal’s largest colony, Brazil: the population is now 166 million, and 95 per cent of them, 158 million, have Portuguese as their first language. This means that speakers in Brazil now outnumber those in Portugal sixteen to one.

How, then, has the language come to be transplanted into Brazil so effectively, but nowhere else? The reasons are, of course, historical, but also political and above all economic. In brief, Brazil was the only one of its colonies where Portugal found both a significant source of wealth which was attractive to immigrants, and no pre-existing power strong enough to resist its domination.

India was certainly a source of wealth, from trade in a vast range of commodities; but the local powers that the Portuguese encountered there effectively resisted any Portuguese break-out from their coastal settlements. In Sri Lanka, known to them as
Ceiláo
, the Portuguese at one time had effective control, and might well have established themselves, and perhaps their language, in the long term if they had not soon been expelled by the Dutch. Farther east, in the islands of the East Indies, the Portuguese looked for profit from the trade in spices; but the bottom fell out of the market for these commodities too soon. It is in any case arguable—not least from comparing the fate of other European empires in Asia—that the kind of wealth derivable from trade with these countries was never going to attract large numbers of immigrants, and so build a large Portuguese-language community. Trade requires capital, or at least a significant military force to impose terms; as a result, governments and large-scale organisations have an overwhelming advantage. Where trade, rather than production, is the source of wealth, the only way for large numbers of immigrants and small-scale outsiders to take part is if they become pirates.

In Africa, although Portugal had held small settlements all down the western coast since the fifteenth century, principally as staging ports for the
carreira da Índia
, no serious source of wealth besides the slave trade was ever discovered. They never attracted large numbers of Portuguese-speaking settlers. But this trade contributed mightily, at one remove, to the spread of Portuguese in South America. Of the 10 million African slaves shipped to the Americas between 1526 and 1870, 3.6 million went to Brazil alone,
¹²
at first to provide labour for sugar plantations, later for cotton and tobacco. As in the other slave economies of the Americas, the Africans could not bring their languages with them. They were in contact with too few of their ex-neighbours to speak those languages, for the slave markets distributed them without regard to origin all over the colonies, and they had perforce to learn the language of their new masters. Often too those very masters would become the fathers of their children; in a very few generations most of the population came to be of mixed blood, but nonetheless speakers just of Portuguese.

White immigration too was more substantial into Brazil than to anywhere else in the Portuguese possessions. Early on, neither Portugal’s court nor its people had taken much interest in their American colony, since it had unaccountably not yielded anything like the copious gold and silver that the Spanish were extracting from their colonies in Mexico and Peru.

But the hostile attentions of other European powers, and the effort needed to repel them, then concentrated Portugal’s sense that here was something worth having. The Spanish had respected the claims in accord with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas—indeed, from 1580 to 1640 Spain and Portugal were united under a single (Spanish) government—but other powers that were not party to it had been more dangerous. The French had posed the first challenge in 1555, with raids and attempted settlements that persisted until 1615, then the English (less seriously) from 1582 to 1595. Most aggressive were the Dutch. After some early inconsequential attacks in 1598-9, from the 1620s until 1641 they succeeded in taking possession of the whole of the Brazilian north-east from Sáo Luis to Aracaju, and holding it until 1654. In 1624 they had even briefly taken the very heart of the Portuguese colony, its first capital at Baía (also called Salvador). The Portuguese seem to have found the determination, and hence the resources, to retake them only when they resigned themselves finally to the loss of most of their colonies in India and beyond. (Indeed, as we shall soon see, those became the next target of the Dutch.)

A series of resolute expeditions had mapped out most of the interior by the mid-seventeenth century. Known as
bandeiras
, ‘flags’, they were inspired by the (mostly unavailing) quest for gold, silver, jewels or natives to capture as slaves. Their main success had lain in pre-emptively defining borders with Spain’s colonies that were being rather less actively explored from the opposite side of the continent. (The borders were actually agreed a hundred years later in the Treaties of Madrid, 1750, Pardo, 1761 and Ildefonso, 1777, which finally erased the notional Line of Tordesillas.)

Despite these explorations, until the second half of the seventeenth century the only Portuguese to settle more than 400 kilometres from the coast had been the missionaries, especially the Jesuits. And as in the Spanish colonies, they had found it easier to preach in a language other than their own. Most of the local languages they called
línguas travadas
, ‘hobbled tongues’, so there was evidently little enthusiasm for them. In a celebrated sermon preached to a departing mission in 1657, Father Antonio Vieira said he had heard someone call the Amazon the
’rio Babel’
, for its eighty languages: ‘What must it be to learn Nheengaíba, or Juruna, or Tapajó, or Teremembé, or Mamaianá, whose very names seem to strike terror?… To the Apostles God gave tongues of fire, but to their successors a fire of tongues. The tongues of fire came to an end, but the fire of tongues did not, because this fire, this spirit, this love of God makes one learn, study and know those languages.’
¹³

For all this heady combination of language-learning and the love (or fear) of God, in Brazil it had turned out that Tupinambá (a language very closely related to the Guaraní of Paraguay) could be used everywhere (see Chapter 10, ‘Past struggles: How American languages had spread’, p. 348), and it came to be called the
língua geral
(the Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish
lengua general).
In the early days of the colony, it was the main means of communication with the natives. One Jesuit witness wrote, about 1560: ‘Almost all who come to the Kingdom and are settled and in communication with the Indians get to know it within a short time, and the sons and daughters of the Portuguese born here get to know it better than the Portuguese do, mainly in the captaincy of Sao Vicente.’
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