Linguistic Imperialism and the hybridity of language in South America
Image attributed to eddtoro on istockphoto.com — Taíno Indian sculpture Isabela, Puerto Rico
The phenomenon of linguistic imperialism began the moment Christopher Columbus set foot on the Bahamas on that fateful day: October 12th, 1492. Or did it? Modern-day histories will delineate Columbus as the ‘discoverer’ of the New World, and his expedition as the precursor of the formation of the USA as a nation-state, as well as the fuel for national imaginaries across the North and South American continents. However, it is this substantive ‘discoverer’ which problematises notions of autochthonous linguistic origins. By uncovering the etymologies of lexicon which have been deemed Castilian, this article aims to shed light on their semantic subtexts and what they depict about the topographical and historical clash between two civilisations: the European and the “American”. Over centuries it has been assumed that the conquest of the Americas induced total Spanish supremacy in the New World, particularly due to the sense of domination concomitant with the term “conquest”. That being said, were you aware that the conquest was never a clear-cut supersession of one culture by another? This reality can be glimpsed in the indigenous linguistic traces embedded within modern Castilian.
The Bahamas in 1492 were inhabited by the native Taíno peoples, who occupied the Caribbean and spoke an Arawakan ancestral language. It is twice now that the geographic nomenclature Bahamas has been used in this article, and I would be intrigued to know whether it has aroused for you any sense of curiosity regarding its linguistic roots. The Bahamas – derived from the Spanish terms baja and mar – provides topographical details in the sense that its etymological origins sketch out the shallow waters surrounding the archipelago. Columbus’ onomastic fascination does not cast doubt on the Europeans’ empirical capacities of noting what they see and channelling it somehow into linguistic forms. For example, the Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, in his documentation of the nature and social practices of the New World in Historia general y natural de las Indias, perhaps unwittingly signalled the arbitrary nature of nomenclature; he employed European imperial algorithms and schemata in his work to classify the pineapple – an object alien to Spanish citizens – according to its resemblance to a piña (pinecone) and alcachofa (artichoke). Bearing this arbitrariness in mind, behind the superficial façade of the term Bahamas, there lies an authentic indigenous history of Guahaní, which was the island’s original Taíno name, and has been obscured in the legacy of colonisation. In this sense, Columbus instigated a linguistic conquest just as much as a military, imperial conquest in South American territory. Tzvetan Todorov has recognised Columbus’ perception of the “name of things as confounded with the thing itself”, as the signifier – the European impression of the region – and the signified – national reality – collide to form a semiotic sign, which takes form in the noun Bahamas. It is through Columbus’ sensorial experiences in the Caribbean that he used his European subjectivities to catalyse a chain reaction of classification: the Spanish rearticulation of an indigenous reality through the imposition of the inherently Spanish term Bahamas. In fact, Columbus initially called the Bahamas San Salvador, translated roughly as Holy Saviour, to mark the providentialism that guided his imperial mission. The nominal evolution from Guahaní to San Salvador to Bahamas indicates the forced funnelling of an “Other”, indigenous reality into the Eurocentric frameworks of Western civilisation – an occurrence which was not uncommon in South America throughout its history.
Image attributed to Kolbz on istockphoto.com — Bahamas Government Building
Although the vestiges of European conquest have made their mark on South American forms of identity, many indigenous words continue to circulate in modern-day Latin America. We undergo an unconscious assimilation of the indigenous past – a past which continues to be subjugated in modern times – purely through the act of enunciating these words. For example, Nahuatl, belonging to a group of languages in the Uto-Aztecan family, was the principal language of the Aztec Empire between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Chocolate, perhaps one of the most widely circulated lexes today, is derived from the Nahuatl word xocolatl, signifying bitter water. The westernisation of this word, when paired with the solid form that this product is currently marketed in, indirectly demonstrates the cultural intricacies of Aztec traditions, insofar as bitter water indicates how it was a drink before it was circulated as a solid food 150 years ago. Similarly, Taíno, a member of the Maipurean language family, which proliferated in the Caribbean, possesses many terms which have been absorbed into the Spanish linguistic network. Maíz (corn), canoa (canoe) and tabaco (tobacco), originated from the Taíno forms mahiz, canoa and tabaco respectively, with canoa and tabaco remaining unchanged upon their integration into the Spanish language.
These changes reflect the innate hybridisation of terms in the Spanish language. They are terms which can be observed as semiotic signs to decipher – signs charged with indigenous cultural phenomena which have become inscribed in the margins of a history of language colonialism. Perhaps the first thing instilled in the territory when Christopher Columbus landed in South America – which funnily enough, he thought was Asia – was a form of linguistic hegemony. Stephen Greenblatt has noted that Columbus’ act of land possession was essentially a “set of linguistic acts: declaring, witnessing, recording. The acts are public and official”. It is through a linguistic performance that Christopher Columbus was able to, as it were, write and speak into existence a New World that was blended with the Eurocentric tropes and mentality which he carried with him. Nowadays, this can give way to forms of historical revisionism and collective memory which perpetuate indigenous cultural erasure and distortion through the indirect reinforcement of colonial narratives and power dynamics. Despite this threat of solely westernised historiographies in the Americas, I believe that the introduction of Castilian in the New World did not mute or even stifle indigenous discourses. Today, the revitalisation and survival of many languages that are endemic to South America, such as Quechua, Guarani, Aymara and Wayuu, are testament to this.
Columbus, when he landed in Guahaní territory, internalised his surroundings, and then underwent the process of “translating, naming and classifying”, which, according to François Hartog, “are operations that are part of the process of colonisation [and] intricate to the process of ‘othering’”. Despite this attempt at “othering” the indigenous land he saw before his eyes, little did Columbus know that the linguistic acts he took would coalesce with many native language characteristics that still prosper today.