Cuisine and Language 5. Expanding and Contracting
Linguists have analyzed when and how languages expand.
Only rarely is it by the natural growth of the original group that speaks the language (the Pacific Island case).
More often it is by military or spiritual conquest. Take the spread of Spanish and Portuguese throughout the world and their transformation into different varieties, Barranquenho, a Portuguese variety on the Portugal-Spain border, Portuguese- and Spanish-based creoles, Andean Spanish, and so on.[i] Clearly this expansion was closely connected with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So too the English language spread with the British Empire in the nineteenth century.
Cuisines too spread with the Portuguese, Spanish and British Empires. In the case of the British Empire, it was most successful in the settlement colonies, less so in the African tropics, and even less so in India with its own vigorous culinary traditions.
Sometimes language change is forced by political powers. Consider the imposition of written Aramaic in the Assyrian and Persian empires in Antiquity. Is it possible that this, by making inaccessible the written recipes of the high cuisine of Ancient Mesopotamia, led to their demise?
Or consider Algeria where rapid political changes have caused rapid changes in language so that three generations of the same family may speak Berber, French and Arabic respectively (thanks to Susan Park for the example). Are there culinary equivalents?
In short, is it possible to make any generalizations about the expansion and contraction of cuisines?
[i] J. Clancy Clements, The Linguistic Legacy of Spanish and Portuguese: Colonial Expansion and Language Change (New York and Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2009).
