33. Traces of the Future

MOST OF THE WORLD’S five hundred million Spanish speakers would be surprised to learn that the name of their language derives from “land of the rabbits” in Phoenician. Which is to say, even in the history of a language that spanned three thousand years, crossed five empires—Phoenician, Roman, Visigothic, Arabic, and Spanish—and picked up words from Greek, Basque, French, West African, and Native American languages, there are some humorous notes.

Though empires rise and fall, the languages they leave behind preserve artifacts of their cultures and carry them into the future. The all-powerful Roman Empire was slipping from European memory when remote tribes living in hill forts in northern Spain started expanding their reach over the entire Iberian Peninsula. The Castilians’ language, at first an obscure version of popular Latin, would evolve and eventually spread across a maritime empire the likes of which the world had never seen. The collapse of that empire then spawned two dozen new countries that share the Spanish language.

Spain’s empire was indeed critical to Spanish. But the real force driving Spanish over the last one thousand years has been the spirit of its speakers, at once ingenious and sensitive, cruel and caring, coarse and highly spiritual.

How will this spirit shape the Spanish of the future? It’s impossible to say. But there have been many surprises.

For instance, no twelfth-century Muslim in Córdoba would have predicted that Al-Andalus—epicenter of the most brilliant culture in Europe at the time—would one day be the scene of a massive witch hunt against false converts, where hundreds of thousands of people would be expelled from its borders because of their religion, and religious zeal would foster intellectual obscurantism.

Nor would a thirteenth-century cleric in Burgos have believed that the Castilian tongue, so crude it wasn’t considered fit for writing, would be the first European vernacular language to have a full dictionary and a systematized grammar with clear spelling rules.

And not even the most literate among Columbus’s crew could have imagined that their voyage would trigger the largest genocide in history. The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, who landed on the shores of Florida on Easter Day five hundred years ago, would have been surprised to learn that his country would one day forfeit chunks of its empire to anti-British insurgents. James Polk and Theodore Roosevelt didn’t know that annexing northern Mexico to the United States would set off one of the largest human migrations in history.

And who would have imagined the rise of telenovelas, or magic realism, or Facebook, or La Movida, not to mention cowboy saddles, cannon powder, and tango? Armies, navies, gold, diplomacy, ideas, and good luck were all key elements in the story of Spanish.

Since so much of the story of Spanish has been about events no one could have predicted, it seems futile to predict its future. However, the past does reveal some deeply embedded features of Spanish that withstood the centuries. And these will probably shape its future.

What are the enduring features of Spanish?

The first is its “culture of language.” The personality or culture of Spanish is very orderly and neat, in complete contrast to the life of the Spanish language itself, which has been disorderly and adventurous. King Alfonso X began defining lo correcto (what is correct) in Castilian in the thirteenth century. Generations of writers, grammarians, lexicographers, and philologists after him upheld the principles he established. The result? Without dismissing colloquial or popular Spanish, or striving to attain an idealized language the way the French do with their doctrine of purism, Spanish speakers over the centuries have grown to expect their language to be used correctly. So even Hispanics in the United States—who form a large minority in a country that is definitely not Spanish speaking—are working to establish their own set of standards. The effort to identify an international standard, called General Spanish, is also the product of the “culture of language” that Spanish speakers have shared for centuries. And Spanish could gain a lot from being the only international language with a very clear international standard.

The second consistent feature of Spanish is its tendency to spread. Spanish is a very entropic, centrifugal language. Born in one empire, it spread, and is still spreading, as if it requires disorder to stay alive. Already present when Castile became an organized force, this quality was an essential ingredient of the Reconquista and of Spanish colonialism after that. But after the collapse of the colonial empire, when Spanish countries found themselves distanced by competing powers, Spanish kept spreading. Yet this feature carried disadvantages: although Spanish is the world’s second or third language for its number of speakers, no single Spanish-speaking country is very big. On the other hand, this spread or geographic diversity means that Hispanics who faced severe problems in their home country have always been able to find a Spanish-speaking haven somewhere in the world.

“Depth” is the third lasting feature of Spanish. French is more widely spread but is deeply implanted in only a few places. Spanish has a deep presence wherever it is spoken. The large number and density of native speakers produce a rich and prolific cultural market in Spanish, a market that has demonstrated its potential repeatedly, with a great number and variety of cultural products entering global culture. Yet oddly, Spanish doesn’t seem to spread by any means other than close contact, which is why it expands only in neighboring territories like the United States, Brazil, and France. This inability to reach out may have its roots in Spain’s early rejection of the Enlightenment ideals. Today, this inward-looking tendency is rearing its head in the form of undereducation of the masses and a chronic struggle to sustain functioning democracies—both of which, whatever their exact causes, diminish the attractiveness of Spanish.

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There are a few things in the future of Spanish that seem quite certain. They can all be summarized in the oft-repeated formula, El futuro del español es América (The future of Spanish is America)—América here referring to the entire continent and not a single country.

Spanish will continue to be an international language dominated by a large number of native speakers, 90 percent of whom live on the west side of the Atlantic Ocean. Short of a massive global catastrophe or epidemic, this will not change, except perhaps in Bolivia and Paraguay, where there are native languages that still rival Spanish. Linguistically speaking, Spanish will be driven by Latin American dialectal influence. That tendency will keep increasing as (and if) the economies and standard of living of Latin America countries continue to improve.

Spain is a different story. While Spanish is solidly entrenched in most Hispanic countries, in Spain it is still competing with Catalan, and on Catalan’s home turf. Although nothing in the foreseeable future suggests that Catalan will erase Spanish, the idea that Catalan might break away from the story of Spanish, the way Portuguese did nine centuries ago, is not inconceivable.

The two main non-Hispanic countries where Spanish is making serious inroads, Brazil and the United States, constitute big chunks of América. The reasons Spanish is making progress in each country are very different: in Brazil, it’s trade; in the United States, it’s migration. Theoretically, either country could reverse the trend with laws or policies, but this would come at a price, and in both cases is unlikely.

Hispanic migration—or migratory pressure—will last as long as the standard of living in the United States remains so much higher than that of the rest of the continent. Demographics also reveal another certainty: Mexico’s birthrate is dropping. According to Jim Peach of New Mexico State University, the aging of the border population will slow migration but not bring it to a halt.

As we were writing, Hispanic immigration to the United States had slowed to historically low levels. Most experts believe that high unemployment in the United States, especially in the construction industry, explains the trend. If that’s the case, migration is likely to pick up again as the economy improves. The other explanation is Mexico’s economy, which is growing, as its birthrate is falling. If that’s the real explanation, then migration rates to the United States will slow, though no one can predict how much.

But in either case, the United States is bound to weigh much more heavily than Brazil in the predictable future of Spanish. This is clear from the numbers. Brazil is pushing to spread Spanish as a second language, and its efforts are aided by the fact that 90 percent of the vocabulary of Portuguese is similar to Spanish. Yet only half a million Hispanics live in Brazil. There are already a hundred times more Spanish speakers living in the United States. The relative weight of the United States on Spanish is also phenomenal. In the 1960s, Hispanics in the United States amounted to no more than 2 percent of the global Hispanic population. They now represent 16 percent and might reach almost 25 percent by 2050.

In the U.S. counties where Hispanics form the majority, or close to it, Spanish shows signs of competing with English as an assimilating force. This massive demographic shift will leave traces on the language. The United States has its own academy of Spanish, which works in collaboration with all the other Spanish-language academies in the world in defining General Spanish. The academy in the United States is even striving to define the Spanish of the United States, since American media and translators are progressively doing that anyway.

As a result, the tastes and inclinations of American Hispanics count more and more to Spanish-language countries trying to reach global markets. This is true of telenovelas and of music. The Lebanese Colombian singer Shakira was already an international Spanish-speaking star before she made her foray into the American market around 2000. Ten years later, when she reverted to Spanish, she was an entirely different type of artist, and Hispanics bought it.

Writing is another example. Hispanics in the United States are culturally distinct from Hispanics elsewhere. Linguists have noticed that Spanish writing in the United States tends to use more concise sentences and paragraphs. Exactly how this will modify or influence Hispanic writing around the world remains to be seen, but the more Hispanics there are in the United States, the stronger their influence will be.

Miguel Abad, the cultural attaché of the Spanish consulate in Los Angeles, told us that every Hispanic country in the world is trying to get into the U.S. cultural markets. Spain, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina are all working actively to boost their cultural links with the United States. This may or may not influence U.S. society as a whole, but it will certainly affect U.S. Hispanics as well as all the world’s hispanohablantes (Spanish speakers).

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Beyond these few certainties, much of the future of Spanish should be written in the subjunctive tense—for what’s hypothetical, uncertain, or desired.

What policy and politics will do to Hispanics—in the United States, Latin America, or Spain—is anybody’s guess. Historians and sociologists have often observed that intolerance rises when a minority’s population reaches 5 to 25 percent of the general population. Hispanics in the United States crossed the 5 percent line in 1973. Today, they account for 16 percent of the population and are expected to reach 25 percent in thirty or so years. That means that, over merely three generations, they could have moved in and out of the danger zone.

In the meantime, will political intolerance stunt the growth of the Hispanic population? Immigration could be stopped, immigrants could be sent back, assimilation could be forced. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible.

It’s also possible that Hispanics will go on to create a new political reality in the United States, including official bilingualism in some states, more federal support for Spanish, or deeper ties with Mexico. If 22 percent of Mexicans live in the United States today, what will the proportion be in thirty years, and what will that mean for the United States when it comes to managing retirement, labor relations, and trade? These are speculations. And if the U.S. Congress some day agrees to incorporate Puerto Rico into the Union, Spanish will enter the U.S. Congress. These again are speculations, but also possibilities.

And in either of these scenarios, what will happen to the Spanish spoken in the United States? Will it vanish as Hispanics assimilate? Will it adapt to the rules of General Spanish? Or will Spanglish evolve into a whole new language? Speculations, again.

The politics of the rest of the Hispanic world are equally impossible to predict. If lessons from the past can be used to predict the future, then the Americas will not grow as fast as the rest of the world, and massive migration toward neighboring countries will continue north of the Rio Grande. If Brazil succeeds in its passage from third-world to first-world country, this will certainly induce more Hispanic migration there.

Will Latin America overcome chronic undereducation, underdevelopment, and its authoritarian tendencies as Spain managed to? Spain had the help of the European Union, but no one will underwrite Latin America’s transformation.

Yet the recent past may signal a promising new trend. Latin America is richer, more democratic, and better educated that it has ever been. Even Mexico’s economy and democracy, despite the brutal drug war going on, are not on a downward spiral, largely because the growing Mexican middle class is holding the country together out of sheer willpower.

What will these political trends do to the language? Impossible to say.

The Spanish language, meanwhile, is unquestionably the unifying force of the Hispanic world and its greatest cultural export. Two centuries of centrifugal politics on two continents have not resulted in any country pulling away from General Spanish. There is always a risk it may happen, but neither Fidel Castro in Cuba nor Hugo Chávez in Venezuela—to name recent examples—has dared do that. And even if one country were to splinter from General Spanish—and one of the small countries could—this would probably not affect the future of Spanish in the least.

The more significant question about the future of Spanish is whether Hispanics will meet the educational challenges they face and overcome the heritage of colonialism, conservatism, and inquisitorial obscurantism. Global artistic and cultural success shows that the Hispanic world can achieve a lot when it wants to. But it still faces an uphill battle to overcome its deficit in scientific and technological output.

H. G. Wells, in his novel The Shape of Things to Come, predicted—among other things—that Spanish and English would one day “become interchangeable languages.” He predicted that in 2059, a so-called Dictatorship of the Air would create a global lingua franca called Basic English, which would mix English and Spanish.

His utopia is totally off the mark, and based on what we know of linguistics, next to impossible. Still, it is fascinating to think that this great visionary saw the future of English linked with that of Spanish—as they undoubtedly will be in the future chapters of the story of Spanish.