Multilingual Empires

Recently, I finished reading the book “ Empires of the Word, A Language History of the World “, a book written in English by the British scholar Nicholas Ostler. This book is about the spread of some widely spoken languages throughout the human history. The book goes from very ancient languages like Sumerian and Akkadian, till widely spoken languages today like English, Mandarin and Spanish. The history and spread of languages like Russian, Persian, Arabic and many more are explained. It supplies answers to questions that may arise regarding the languages used by some world empires. It provides written example of most of those languages mention here with their English translation. It was a real pleasure for me to read this book, and a great source of knowledge and I fully recommend it to all my language lover friends.

Today I want to write about some empires that used multiple languages in their administration. I am not an expert in history and my list below could be far from being complete. There were empires that used their power to impose and spread the use of specific languages. But there were empires that worked with multiple languages, showing respect to the culture of the people under their rule. Here are some. The time period of each empire was googled and are added just as reference. Other sources may provide different time periods.

1.- Achaemenid Empire (550 – 330 BC)

The language of the court was Old Persian. But when this empire started to spread, Old Persian was only orally used. They decided then to adopt other languages already used locally for administration purposes. Two of those languages were Akkadian and Elamite. Those languages existed in written form (Using cuneiform script) and were later adopted for formal communications.

Some Iranians might be surprised if they know, that a document they revere, the Cylinder of Cyrus (often hailed as the first bill of human rights in History) was actually written in Akkadian.

There are evidences that Elamite was used for administration and different documents written in clay tablets were found stored in old archives in Persepolis. You can find more information in the website of Britannica. 

Old Persian cuneiform appeared during the reign of Darius. You can still see old monuments with trilingual cuneiform inscriptions in Old Persian, Akkadian and Elamite. Bisotun inscription is the most famous example.

But the language used the most was Aramaic. This language was previously used by the Assyrian empire. The advantage of having an alphabetic script made it suitable to be used for letters and individual correspondence to spread specific commands on some areas. Aramaic became the language of communication with different regions of the empire.

There are evidences that Demotic Egyptian was used to send commands in the army and for administration. 

We did not mention yet that the religion of the court was Zoroastrianism. This means that in order to understand the content of the scriptures, knowledge of Avestan language was needed.

2.- Roman Empire (27 BC – 476 AD)

Although the official language of the Roman Empire was Latin, It seems that actually Romans appreciated multilingualism. We have to start describing the wide use of Greek language. Greek was already the Lingua franca around the coasts of the Mediterranean sea and it was used mainly for trading. Romans from the upper social classes very often were fluent in Greek and had a deep knowledge of the Hellenic culture. It was not uncommon that 2 or more people in Rome had conversations in Greek. Many of them had slaves who spoke Greek. Greek was also the language of the diplomacy.

Latin was he language of the people of Rome. It was used in the administration. It is interesting to read that although fluency in Latin was a requirement to become Roman citizen, this rule was very often voided.

But at local level, other languages shared space in formal occasions with Latin and Greek. Old trilingual inscriptions and documents were common in some areas, like in Syria (Latin – Greek – Syriac), in Egypt (Latin – Greek – Coptic), North Africa (Latin – Greek – Punic) and Judea (Latin – Greek – Aramaic, or Hebrew in Jewish religious sites). 

In my research, I read some works from Prof. Bruno Rochette, from Université de Liège  who studied the topic of translation in the Roman Empire, where this profession was highly appreciated.

3.- Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1922 AD)

The official language of this empire was Ottoman Turkish, a version of Turkish highly influenced by Persian. An important part of its vocabulary and some grammar rules were borrowed from Persian language. Persian was by itself a very influential language in the court and most of the most highly educated officers were fluent in it. Ottoman Turkish was influenced by Arabic as well, but many borrowings from this language came through Persian. Arabic was the language of important regions ruled by this empire like Arabia, North Africa, the Levant and Iraq. It was important due to religious reasons as well because Sunni Islam was the official religion.

Ottomans respected the languages of the minorities and they were allowed to use in formal occasions although if they needed to communicate with the court, they had to use Ottoman Turkish.

During the last 2 centuries, French emerged as the language of Diplomacy, the science and fluency in this language became more common among the upper classes.

4.- Russian Empire (1721 – 1917 AD)

Russian empire was multilingual at many levels, starting from the Royals, who were fluent in 3 , 4 or more languages. The most common foreign languages that they learned were English, French and German. French had a special place in the upper Russian society. It is documented that members of the aristocracy very often had their chats in French. This fact is reflected in one of the greatest masterpieces of the Russian literature, War and Peace (Война и миръ), written in Russian by Leon Tolstoy, where some of the dialogues were written in French.

Russian was the Official language of the empire. However, there were Non-Russian speaking regions where they continued using their own language for administration and education. At the beginning, there was not a real attempt to impose Russian to others. Places like Poland, Armenia, Georgia, used their own language (Polish, Armenian and Georgian) in their everyday live, officially and informally. Other places, once they became part of the empire, they continued to use the administrative language they previously had. Finland continued to use Swedish as their main language (It is interesting to see that Finnish language became for the first time official under Russian Rule). In Latvia and Estonia, German was the language of education. Ukrainians and Belorussians were not that lucky with their own languages as they were not able to use them publicly and their education was mostly in Russian.  During the second half of the 19^th century serious attempts to make Russian the main language in the regions mention here were received with resistance.

After the fall of the Russian empire came the Soviet Union. They initially allow the use of all the languages spoken in the different regions, but after a couple of years they returned to the use of Russian as their main language, promoting its use abroad.

5.- Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867 – 1918 AD)

This was one of the most multilingual empires in history. During its short existence, this multinational state was the second largest country in Europe (After Russia). It was initially a union between the Austrian empire and the kingdom of Hungary. Then a third component was the kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia. Each part of the empire had its own language policy. Fourteen languages were officially recognized: German, Hungarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Ruthenian and Turkish.

German was the language of the Imperial court and the main language of the central administration. However, generally speaking, any speaker of any of the languages here mention had the right to use their language in school, to address the government and receive services from it, to address the court of justice and be tried in any of those languages.

In the army, all of the languages mention were used although there were some words in German that were used for some commands. At least in the Austrian Parliament (Imperial Council), members of any of the houses were allowed to address their peers in any of those languages, although not always there were services available for interpretation or transcription of the speeches in languages different than German. 

The “krone” (crown) was the official currency. Banknotes were bilingual German – Hungarian. Very often the value of the banknote was indicated in eight other languages: Czech, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian and Romanian. Coins in the German speaking part of the empire had often the value written in Latin.