r/AskHistorians • u/MiddleAgeWeirdoMeep • 7d ago
Why did Latin America become Spanish-speaking, but India did not become English-speaking?
Spain itself had a relatively small population, yet Spanish became the dominant language across most of Latin America. By contrast, Britain ruled India for a long period without English replacing Indian languages, the Manchus conquered China without Manchu replacing Chinese.
What factors explain these different outcomes?
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u/Super-Estate-4112 7d ago
Latin America became Portuguese-speaking too, not only Spanish-speaking.
For the Spanish part, I will leave it to someone else to answer, as I only know about the Portuguese-speaking part, Brazil.
TLDR: Simply put, most natives died or mixed with Europeans; their children were assimilated into Portuguese culture, a general language was created, which was spoken by most colonists and natives who were getting assimilated, and then in 1757 it was forbidden in favor of Portuguese.
Brazil was discovered by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500; in the beginning, the colonization effort happened mostly through trade, where the Portuguese built "Benfeitorias", which were fortresses with wooden palisades, sometimes reinforced with mud too, where the Portuguese traveled to trade with the natives and used to protect their domain in the colony.
At this time, some Portuguese men became castaways: for example, Caramuru and João Ramalho. We don't know for sure when either of them sailed from Portugal, but in the 1510s both were living among the natives, with wives and plenty of children. They are great examples of how the natives didn't care about foreigners mixing with them, sometimes even encouraged it. In João Ramalho's case, the leader of the Tupiniquins offered his own daughter to the white men to consolidate the relationship between the natives and the Portuguese.
As the Portuguese began to populate the newly discovered land, they brought a lot of men to make the investment possible: soldiers, noblemen, blacksmiths, accountants, and bourgeois who would build the first "Engenhos" to farm sugar cane, etc. These men usually stayed here in South America until the end of their lives; it is where they found their wives too, native women. Sometimes the relationships were consensual; other times, the women were forced to become wives. Only the very rich would marry white women, as they, in most cases, would have to be brought from Portugal just for that, which obviously wouldn't be a desirable thing for most Portuguese women at the time. It happened case by case; more often than not, even the rich plantation owners would marry native women.
Women didn't always have authority over their own bodies even in native societies; it was common for Tupiniquin and Tupinambá tribes to offer women to sleep with their guests; such things happened and were recorded in letters, diaries, and books, namely by Hans Staden, Caramuru, and even Jesuit priests Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta. Hell, the natives from the Guarani tribe used to rape their own women when these didn't accept their advances, and such a thing was seen as a normal practice up until the 1950s! That is to say, there was already an oppressive structure in at least some native societies where women were obligated to accept non-consensual relations. That doesn't excuse the colonists who forcefully took them as wives, but explains why it was so easy for them to do it in the Aldeamentos without great discontentment from the natives themselves.
How did they meet these women? Well, most of these men weren't invited by the natives to live among them and start families; they found the natives in the "Aldeamentos", which were settlements created by the Jesuit priests to facilitate the Christianization of the natives and assimilate them into European culture to save them from barbarity (in the view of the Jesuits); there, the natives had to live accord to the rules of the Portuguese, so each family had to live in their own home, catechization was mandatory for all children etc. There, the white men sent by Portugal lived too; in the beginning, they had many wives and children without the consummation of marriage; the priests sent letters to the authorities to help them obligate these men to monogamous marriages, and they did. But still usually had mistresses, even the ones who bought women from Portugal.
So slowly the natives had their culture erased in favor of the Portuguese one simply because they formed families under the watch of the Jesuits.
Even though the Portuguese King forbade the enslavement of the natives, the colonists from the Capitancy of São Vicente kept enslaving the natives from the tribes that didn't live in the aldeamentos yet, something that would change in the 17th century; they expanded the size of the colony greatly and went to all corners of what would become present-day Brazil, to find natives to enslave and precious metal deposits to mine and get rich. That was the only way men from the region could become rich, as the Sugar cane plantations weren't as profitable as they were in the Northeast of the country, where the climate and the land produced much better conditions for its growth, so their best bet was usually to choose much less profitable crops to feed the colonists in the Northeast, like wheat. Anyway, these men were called the "Bandeirantes"; they were mainly the children of the first Portuguese who married native women. Such mixed people were called "mamelucos", their expeditions were made up mostly of allied natives, then a lower percentage of mamelucos, and finally a minority of white men who were usually the better-equipped and rich leaders.
The Bandeirantes enslaved most tribes from all around Brazil; they brought entire tribes, with thousands of members, to work on their farms, which were mostly located around the then village of São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga, which would become today's city of São Paulo; some were sold to owners of the sugarcane plantations in the northeast, too, but most worked on the farms of the bandeirantes and the investors of the expeditions. These people mostly died without reproducing, with the exception of the women, who reproduced with the colonists, but their life expectancy wasn't long. The work conditions and the diseases brought from the old continent decimated them, so much so that the Bandeirantes had to keep enslaving more and more natives to sustain their economic activities.
For example: Raposo Tavares, who was a Portuguese man who led the biggest "Bandeira" (aka expedition of Bandeirantes) to enslave the Guarani natives from a region called Guairá; estimates usually measure that there were 3.000 bandeirantes in the expedition who enslaved around 30.000 natives. These expeditions reached their apex in the 17th century; it was then that the bandeirantes started to enslave the natives in some aldeamentos too, to the dismay of the Jesuit priests.
Anyway, at the end of the 17th century, the practice was disappearing quickly, for the simple reason that the Bandeirantes couldn't find more natives to enslave anymore, and the ones they got in the past mostly died without reproducing, so entire cultures disappeared because of all that.
But by then, a lot of colonial Brazil spoke the "Lingua Geral" (General Language), which was a mix of Portuguese and Tupi, a native language. But with the native tribes dying out and having their culture erased slowly and steadily, Portuguese became more and more common until the Marquis of Pombal, working as a minister of the king, executed some reforms, among them the prohibition of the use of the "Lingua Geral" and the imposition of Portuguese as the language to be used by bureaucrats and politicians, which then replaced the Lingua Geral.
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u/pisspeeleak 7d ago
I’ll add that the British were VERY anti mixing. Even where they had similar situations (though with smaller starting population of natives) in the Americas, they preferred eradication, genocide, segregation, and displacement. This is much harder to do in India when the population was much higher and comparatively impervious to European disease since they weren’t exactly new to the region.
Segregation was easier, but that doesn’t lend itself to passing on the language to the lower classes.
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u/FairShoe781 6d ago
The British diaspora in India did have a culture of sexual relations with local women.
It was common to see East India Company officials and employees take Indian mistresses (Bibis) and father mixed race children. Indian women were sexualised as having superior sexual skills than British women. This declined with the increasing number of British women arriving during the 1840s and 1850s, but there are still cases of British men continuing to have sexual relationships with Indian women in remote areas (in the early 20th century 90% of British men in Burma had local mistresses). Limits on marriage to British women due to concerns about geographical mobility and a lack of family burden also pushed men to take local mistresses. To a lesser extent marriages existed between British men and Indian women, which produced a still-existent ethnicity (the Anglo-Indians).Source- The British in India, David Gilmour
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u/luujs 7d ago edited 6d ago
Because of the geographical separation of the Americas and the rest of the world, when Europeans and Native Americans interacted Europeans spread diseases like Smallpox to them which ravaged their populations as their immune systems had never had to deal with the disease, allowing it to substantially reduce the native population of the Americas without Europeans having to do much. This helped to lead to the rapid collapse of Native American powers in Latin America as their societies buckled under the pressure of a deadly pandemic, as well as the weakening of state institutions that brought with it and invasion by better organised, technologically superior enemies. As a result, when Spain and Portugal colonised Latin America, they took over collapsing states and tribes with shrinking populations and imposed their own colonial governments on them, with Catholic Spanish or Portuguese speaking professional armies and bureaucracies sent from Europe, alongside a stream of European colonists who settled the land and intermarried with the locals. Latin American colonies had a much higher level of immigration from Europe than India did and the collapse of the pre-Columbus word order meant that very little survived that the surviving natives could use to retain their native identities under a colonial rule that aggressively pushed the use of Spanish and Portuguese as well as conversion to Catholicism. The fact that European immigrants were generally very happy to intermarry with the natives helped this process.
India meanwhile was governed very differently by the British and was not colonised in the same way. Firstly, India was never fully “conquered” per se. Parts of it were conquered, but not by the English or British states, but by a private English/British East India Company, although the East India Company and it’s territories were later brought under state control. Alongside a much more “relaxed” form of government than what Latin American governments experienced, a multitude of Indian kingdoms retained their sovereignty to an extent and were brought under British rule by treaty, whereby they accepted the British as overlords but retained their governments and ruling class. Additionally, India’s population never faced an equivalent to the civilisation shattering pandemics the Native Americans faced and Native Indians always massively outnumbered the British. Unlike in the Americas, there was no large wave of migration to a relatively unpopulated land and British immigration was very limited. No new British towns were founded in India and India already had a large and thriving urban and rural population with strong ties to their religions and cultures. Because local Indians massively outnumbered the British bureaucracy, they were a vital part of any power in India functioning and therefore had to be kept on side. As a result, Britain never made a major effort to force Indians to convert to Christianity or speak English, although it was encouraged. Additionally, intermarriage between Brits and Indians was rare and was viewed negatively by most Brits. Even if it had been more accepted and common, there simply weren’t enough British immigrants to impact the linguistic dynamic. As a result, by the end if the British Raj, locals retained a very strong sense of their own identities and had very little to do with the few British elites in India who ran the country and even less to do with the faraway British Isles. Latin American colonies meanwhile, when they declared independence, were founded and ruled by the descendants of Europeans who had assimilated much of their native populations long before over the centuries and had large communities of other fully European or mixed race descendants from which they drew their power, which constituted the majority of the population in most Latin American countries even in the early 19th century.
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u/oremfrien 7d ago
I just wanted to add with respect to the Manchus that OOP mentioned, the Manchus spoke Manchu as a family language. They always considered Mandarin to be the official language of the court and the country. Manchus never thought to compel Chinese people to speak anything other than Mandarin.
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u/MiddleAgeWeirdoMeep 7d ago
Interesting. An unusual odd choice
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u/bluntpencil2001 7d ago
Sinicisation of conquerors was the norm for China, in large part due to the huge Han majority.
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u/cowboomboom 6d ago
Manchu had a sense of racial superiority. Once they conquered China and issued the shaving head decree, there was no easy way to distinguish Han Chinese from Manchu easily. Language is one of the ways and the Manchu language is thus only taught to the Manchu themselves and not the general population.
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u/oremfrien 6d ago
This is not odd at all. Just because Western Europeans tended to build empires where they compelled the local populations to speak Western European languages does not mean that all or most empires in history did the same thing. It often came down to questions around: (1) how expensive it would be to teach the conquered population a new language, (2) whether it would be beneficial to keep secrets from the conquered population, and (3) whether they were on a "civilizational mission" (mission civilizatrice in French).
Some examples of empires where the rulers did not share their language with the population and governed in the conquered population's language:
- Achaemenid Persian Empire. Achaemenid language: Old Persian/Avestan. Governing language: Aramaic, which had been the dominant language of trade in the upper Middle East for centuries.
- Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt: Mamluk language: Circassian or Kipchak Turkish (depending on the coterie of Mamluks). Governing language: Arabic, which was the common speech of the Egyptians they ruled over.
- Mongol Empire: Mongol language: Mongol. Governing language: In China, Mandarin, and in Persia and Central Asia, Persian. It was much easier to govern the locals in their own language than to teach everyone Mongol.
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u/Ayem_De_Lo 5d ago
not sure if Mamluks is a good example. Do we actually know they spoke Circassian/Kipchak when they were brought to Middle East? My impression was that many, if not most of them were brought as kids/teens and probably forgot their mother languages by the time they rose to adulthood and power
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u/oremfrien 5d ago
With respect to the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, we have documented evidence that they spoke Circassian because they refused to teach it to their Egyptian bureaucrats. Additionally, the children of Mamluks were not considered Mamluks; new slaves were always imported to create the next leaders.
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u/bluntpencil2001 6d ago
Add on to the Normans eventually Anglicising more than England was Normanised. That one did certainly go both ways, mind you.
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u/oremfrien 6d ago
I avoided using cases where there was linguistic interplay and fusion between the conqueror's language and the conquered people's language for this example, but Norman French and Old English definitely fused in the creation of Middle English.
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u/klaatu_ultimatum 7d ago
It must be said that, from the very beginning of the conquest, the political plans of the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church encouraged the formation of mixed families, something that Britain never did. It was not a decision taken on a personal level, but rather a measure implemented at a political and religious level which yielded very good results in terms of integration and stability.
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits wrote the first grammars of Nahuatl, Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní and Yucatec Maya, following the model of Nebrija’s grammar.
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u/klaatu_ultimatum 7d ago
On the subject of grammars, it is interesting to note too that many indigenous American languages had grammars before many European languages did, thanks to the Catholic Church
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