Babel #5: The Colony Takes Over the Language

At work, I remember being told to remember that we had translate our English UI to both Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. Separately – the two were that different. While reading Gaston Dorren’s Babel, I learnt that while the vocabulary is 99% common, the pronunciations are seriously different, so much so that it not even the same language anymore!

 

Dorren still counts them as one though (#7, 275 million speaker). Most of his chapter on Portuguese is about a question he asks himself: Why did Portuguese spread across the world (remember, it is 7th in the most spoken languages list)? Whereas Dutch language hardly spread?

 

In fact, neither power tried actively to instill their language in their colonies (the French put a lot more effort on that front; and it never yielded proportional results. French is #10, 250 million). Nor is Portuguese an easier language to learn in any way (it is as hard or easy as any foreign language).

 

One reason is where they colonized. Portugal established early plantations in thinly populated Brazil. The labour for which was, yes, slavery. For that, Portugal established forts on the West African coast, including Angola. The Dutch went to Asia and their biggest colony was the Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia). As a re-supply and layover location, the Dutch took the southern part of Africa (now South Africa).

 

In Brazil, there followed a gold rush. For which a lot of men went from Portugal, but no women. These men married the locals, settled down there and it caused Portuguese to spread in Brazil. No equivalent event of mass settlement of Dutch citizens happened in Asia.

 

A final reason is the economic conditions of Portugal and the Netherlands. Since Portugal underwent bouts of economic depression, a lot of its citizens went elsewhere (colonies) hoping for a better life. The Netherlands, on the other hand, was almost always prosperous, so few Dutch folks ever went off to other lands to settle there. The only exception to that was South Africa (remember, the layover to Asia location) where a lot of Dutch did settle and with them came the Dutch language. Even that faded away when Britain took over South Africa.

 

Today, Brazilian Portuguese dominates the world. Because Brazil is the growing economy and has a much larger population. So much so that when someone says they want to learn Portuguese, they are asked which one (Brazil? Or Portugal?), and most people pick the Brazilian version. Portugal today is irritated by its “linguistic dethronement” while the Brazilians barely even notice Portugal…

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