The Languages of Latin America

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"Learn Spanish", delegates will be urged when they attend an assignment briefing on South America. Unless of course they're going to Brazil, in which case, learn Portuguese. Employees will almost certainly be less effective in their job, find it more difficult to establish good business and social relationships with colleagues or to profit from the wealth of local culture unless they attempt to learn to speak the language.

If they have already acquired Spanish in Spain, they will be told that the Spanish of Latin America is different. Much as the English of the USA is different from that of the UK. The Portuguese of Brazil, despite some seepage from Amerindian tongues and even more from the African languages originally introduced by slaves - particularly Yoruba in the area of Bahia - retains some archaic features of old European Portuguese.

But if we consider only what happened to Spanish and Portuguese when they crossed the Atlantic, we shall barely be grazing the surface of the heady linguistic brew that Latin America provides.

It is generally believed that the indigenous peoples of the Americas are descended from nomadic tribes that crossed The Bering Straits from Asia tens of thousands of years ago. Gradually over the ages some of the hundreds of languages that they brought with them developed into the languages encountered by the first Europeans when they arrived at the end of the fifteenth century. Arawak, the first native language heard by Christopher Columbus, was spoken in areas of the land that was to become Venezuela. 'Canoe', 'tobacco' and 'hammock' are Awarak words that we have adopted.

Some of the ancient tongues are still spoken today. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs in Mexico is spoken by about one million people, many of whom speak nothing else. Our words 'tomato', 'avocado' and 'chocolate' are taken from the Aztecs.

In highland South America, the most widely spoken indigenous language is Quecha, a legacy of the Inca empire which until the fifteenth century covered a vast area from the southern part of what is now Colombia to the north of modern Chile and Argentina. Today Quecha is spoken by about 8 million people. In 1975 Peru declared it an official language. Another country which has a second official language is Paraguay where GuaranÔ is spoken by about 90% of the population.

In Latin America, as in the rest of the world, English is the common language of science and technology.

The complex linguistic picture is just one aspect of the cultural diversity of Latin America, a vast region where the legacy of ancient civilisations coexists with the latest ground-breaking developments of the modern world.

There are signs that Latin America will play an increasingly important part on the world economic stage. A pointer is provided by the American Express Bank which in a recently published report on the tiger economies of the world, included two Latin American countries, Argentina and Chile on its list of 'near-tigers'. Four others - Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Uruguay figured in the bank's assessment of 'tiger-cubs'.