Words of Conquest

Abstract

Along with the colonialist expansion of European Modern States, an intense circulation of natural species, commodities and people took place throughout the world then known to the Europeans. Regarding the flow of people, an initial dilemma faced was how to understand the immense ‘galaxy of different idioms’ contacted with the advance of the colonial enterprise. The lingoas (interpreters) were initially used as mediators between Europeans and the groups with which they came into contact. During the sixteenth century, Europeans began to ‘civilise’ the languages of those groups (in South America, Asia and later in Africa), by a process involving both grammaticalisation and dictionarisation, following an analogous and simultaneous movement that was occurring in Europe. Therefore, dictionaries, grammars and other instruments of translation were used to create understanding between languages, but also between cultures (habits, forms of sociability, and so on.)—both within Europe as well as in the colonial settlements.