The Spread of Empires By far the largest shift to occur with regards to global language patterns that has occurred in the past four hundred years has been the rise in colonialism and the spread of European languages across the globe to every continent in the world. It has not only had a profound effect on global politics, but language as well, for on the backs of each colonist languages were brought from Europe to far away places, where natives were often suppressed and native tongues destroyed. Colonialism would start the process of the largest mass extinction of languages ever seen in world history, as native populations were either killed, be it from disease or war, and those that lived were forced to adopt foreign customs. Colonialism is why the Americas speak primarily Romance and Germanic languages, and why English is an official language of India, a country thousands of miles away from England. While colonialism affected the whole world, the areas most affected linguistically were the Americas, Africa, and Asia, where languages were repressed and replaced with foreign tongues.
Africa Africa is an interesting look into colonialism, because linguistically there was not too much change for most peoples. Due to the isolation of many places and people in Africa, as well as the fact that colonialism in Africa was solely for resources, with very few actual colonists being sent to Africa compared to America, European languages did not spread to take over day to day life as they did in the Americas. Instead, their influence lasted after the Europeans left after dividing Africa into arbitrary states, as these states were usually only tied linguistically through the language of the colonial overlords. This means that much of the administrative language of African countries is still European, with day to day affairs continuing in the local dialect or language. If one goes farther north in Africa, from the Sahara above, Arabic becomes the lingua franca, and this remains even in areas colonized by Europeans. While Europeans did colonize north Africa for quite a while, they had little effect linguistically due to the lack of effort to introduce their language as well as the deep entrenchment of Arabic in the region. For these reasons, linguistically, colonialism had a very small effect on Africa.
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The Americas The Americas were conquered by multiple different European powers, each spreading their own language to the continent. The standard procedure of the colonialists was to spread their own people across the continent, but with little regard for actually spreading their language or culture to the repressed natives, many of which died from diseases the colonialists brought over. These natives were not forced to learn the colonialists language, often ended up doing so as colonialists held the higher strata in the society. Language was spread through missionaries to the New World, who brought with them education and religion, and usually forced converts to use the language in which they taught. This saw the eventual spread of languages such as Spanish to the native populations of areas such as Mexico. Native languages were usually suppressed or died out as they lost their use, and with this their knowledge died with them.
Asia Colonialism in Asia saw a different turn, with not all colonies being European. India was tied under English rule, leading to the widespread use of English in the region, which is why it is still an official language up to the present day, being used much like colonial languages in Africa to tie the very divided country together with a single language. Other areas such as Vietnam and Indonesia, which were colonized by Europeans, saw little affect on language in the region, as when the Europeans left, so to did the influence of their languages due to distance. The Japanese also colonized areas of the Asia, taking Manchuria from China in the 20th century and attempting to spread Japanese across Asia. Despite their efforts and conquering Korea and Manchuria, the Japanese did not hold these areas for long enough to spread their language to these regions. As discussed in the Chinese history section, many Chinese were moved across Asia during the colonial period, causing for a massive Chinese population to be found across Southeast Asia in almost every major city. This has led to Chinese becoming a lingua franca in Southeast Asia as well as much of East Asia, a direct result of colonialism.
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