Make certain Spanish colonies keep their original languages

You can't really do alot with North America and some parts of South America; the Spanish enforced Spanish and punished using other languages which combined with major economic incentive to speak Spanish means the native languages are going to either die out or only be spoken by a minority.

In some parts of South America native languages are still major languages, however these tend to be places where Spanish rule was never really firm and in which their was'nt alot of settlement by Europeans.
 
In some parts of South America native languages are still major languages, however these tend to be places where Spanish rule was never really firm and in which their was'nt alot of settlement by Europeans.
Such as Paraguay, where Guarani is not only widely used but even (IIRC) shares 'offiical' status wirth Spanish.


It wasn't exactly a Spanish colony, but in Brazil either the Tupi language itself or a Tupi-Portuguese pidgin came very close to displacing Portuguese as the main language at one stage during the 18th century.
 
Spanish like other colonial powers too, attempt always introduce their own culture and language to colonies so it would be bit dfficult get Spain act differently. And another thing is that small pox and other European diseases caused much damage for natives. Perhaps even more than just wars.
 
Such as Paraguay, where Guarani is not only widely used but even (IIRC) shares 'offiical' status wirth Spanish.

Guarani is'nt just widely used, it's the majority first language, however Guarani in Paraguay has a unique history.

Guarani itself was actually afforded some officialdom as it was used to teach the Guarani peoples by the Catholic Church, their was a Catholic Order that spoke it and one of the early Missionaries was a supporter of the language, comparing it to the 'civilized' languages in Europe; in the 19th century Portugal went to war and lost badly, seeing the majority of its male population dieing, leading to those left being indigenous, Mestizos and of the Europeans primarily women, children and the elderly, which all combined to allow Guarani to become a major language.

Now Spanish of course was still widely spoken back then and a major language, which is why Portugal is one of the few countries where the population is fully bilingual, with Guarani understood and spoken by over 90% of the population and Spanish by 87%.
 
You can't really do alot with North America and some parts of South America; the Spanish enforced Spanish and punished using other languages which combined with major economic incentive to speak Spanish means the native languages are going to either die out or only be spoken by a minority.

In some parts of South America native languages are still major languages, however these tend to be places where Spanish rule was never really firm and in which their was'nt alot of settlement by Europeans.

In fact, the Spanish, upon learning that the indigenous peoples were having a very hard time learning Spanish (a funny anecdote is that they learned Latin much easier, to the point of embarassing some Spanish scholars), Spain decided to somehow normativize and uniformize a few of their languages, becoming de facto co-official with Spanish.

It wasn't until the American Independencies that the spanish-speaking creole class decided to enforce Spanish as the only official language, shortly after the late XVIII indigenous rebellions undermined the power the native nobility held.

A way to make them survive would be to manage the indigenous nobility to remain polítically powerful longer, and lean to liberalism, so they become an important powerbase of the independentism.
 
Guarani itself was actually afforded some officialdom as it was used to teach the Guarani peoples by the Catholic Church, their was a Catholic Order that spoke it and one of the early Missionaries was a supporter of the language, comparing it to the 'civilized' languages in Europe; in the 19th century Portugal went to war and lost badly, seeing the majority of its male population dieing, leading to those left being indigenous, Mestizos and of the Europeans primarily women, children and the elderly, which all combined to allow Guarani to become a major language.

Now Spanish of course was still widely spoken back then and a major language, which is why Portugal is one of the few countries where the population is fully bilingual, with Guarani understood and spoken by over 90% of the population and Spanish by 87%.
Alas, both my Spanish and most especially my Guarani are a little rusty at the moment. :D

(I know you were thinking Paraguay whenever you wrote Portugal :p)
 
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