Why wasn't Spanish a universal language in Europe?

You are partially correct on this premise. France also had regional dialects as well, called 'patois'. Spain was part of the House of Habsburg which they can marry outside of the empire.
Some "patois" were separate languages entirely, most famously Occitan, with it's rich medieval literary tradition.
 
I am rather tired of this kind of narrowed and simplistic narrative regarding 16th-17th century Spain being perpetuated.

Fine, theres been a grand conspiracy since the early modern era to cover up Spain's military, cultural, financial, and industrial prowess and deny it its rightful place as the hegemonic power of Europe, and the fact that it's been a battleground for the lesser states of Europe for 300 years means nothing.
 
There are a lot of reasons why a language becomes a lingua franca of the elite, and they don't neatly boil down to a state's wealth or power. Otherwise, we could have seen, say, Polish sweep the aristocracy of Eastern Europe, or some form of Italian come to dominate the late medieval period.
 
France was (and is) in the heart of western Europe, and has a direct border with Spain, England, Italy, Germany and the Low Lands.
It has always been the most populous and rich part of Europe until the 20th century
It has had a very strong influence on the rest of Europe, since the times of Charlemagne.
At least three times has made a serious attempt to become the sole hegemonic power in Europe (Charlemagne, Louis XVI and Napoleon)
Should I go on?
I would like to add to your points.
The first Iberian kingdom to be a European power was the Kingdom of Aragon. Its possessions outside of Spain include the Two Sicilies, Malta and the Duchy of Athens, which was a crusader state. Another attempt was with the ascent of Charles the V from the House of Habsburg, it combined the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain's possessions of Europe and the Americas.
 
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Why wasn't Spanish a universal language in Europe? How did French become the universal language instead of Spanish? Spain was a global power in the 16th Century and was very rich. The University of Salamanca was a popular place for the teaching of the Spanish language.
Because it was late to the party and didn't last enough. France was a consistently powerful and big nation in Europe for centuries before French began to spread as lingua franca, then several more centuries of establishing itself had passed by the point Spain had even formed much less become the power it was at it's height. Long before the time it took for French to start spreading Spain was replaced by the British Empire as foremost European power yet centuries would pass with French still remaining as lingua franca before it was overtaken; even then that can only be partly attributed to the British Empire with the decline of nobility as social force and the rise of the United States also playing fundamental roles.

As for your other questions fundamentally because Spain lost and lost badly.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
I would like to add to your points.
The first Iberian kingdom to be a European power was the Kingdom of Aragon. Its possessions outside of Spain include the Two Sicilies, Malta and the Duchy of Athens, which was a crusader state. Another attempt was with the ascent of Charles the V from the House of Habsburg, it combined the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain's possessions of Europe and the Americas.

But at that point Aragon was not Spanish speaking. The nobility in Aragon almost certainly knew Castilian, but they also spoke Aragonese and Catalan, seemingly using different languages with different people. The language used in the Aragonese conquests was initially Catalan, with a little Aragonese thrown in, but in Italy they adopted Italian very quickly. The "Spanish" domination of Northern Italy in the 17th century did lead to a wider use of Spanish in Europe. There is also a rash of borrowing from Spanish in all other Western European languages occurring between 1500 and 1700, reflecting what must have a been a degree of contact in that period, and bilingualism is recorded especially among those who traded in the Atlantic.

However, the main reason that Spanish did not become the "dominant language" of Europe is that there was no vacancy. French had been a diplomatic lingua franca, as well as a caste language of the European aristocracy, since the 13th century. It was still in use for domestic matter in the English chancery in 1470, and only ceased to be used in court reports in the 18th!

Scientific and religious discourse occurred in Latin, and as all previous knowledge was written in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, there was no advantage in adding another language to the mix. This is especially true given Spain lagged behind other areas in scientific investigation due to its peripheral location.

As for the day-to-day linguistic contacts of the Mediterranean, there already was a lingua franca, it was a pidgin usefully called Lingua Franca (LF) and was largely based on Italian. Now, there is disagreement about when true Lingua Franca started, but a text from Djerba in 1353 shows strategies similar to LF, use of uninflected infinitive, lack of adjectival agreement, SVO word order and latinate vocabulary of Italian origin. So during the brief time Spain was a hegemonic power, there was a much easier option for communication between speakers of different languages in the Med than the adoption of Spanish. Again, Spain's peripherality was a factor, in 1500 Spanish was only spoken in the section of the Mediterranean coast between Cartagena and Gibraltar. Much easier for everybody to use broken Italian, which was something Italians already did with each other, due to their "dialectal" differences. By 1650, you could hear LF from Jerusalem to Casablanca by way of Greece, Malta, Sicily and Gibraltar. If Spain had maintained its power in the 17th and 18th century, then maybe LF would have relexified as a form of Spanish (Algerian French showed the influence of LF up till the 1930's) this process being helped by the large Sephardic population in the Mediterranean. But Spain didn't maintain its power, and by the 1690's we were already looking at a basket case.
 
True, and most of the times think that if the person they are talking to does not understand is just a matter of raising their voice to facilitate comprehension ;)
More seriously, Latin has been a kind of universal language for at least 15 centuries, although I doubt that the Latin of 15th century AD would be understandable to native Latin speakers of 1st century AD.
Obviously when I say "universal language" I refer to a thin layer of educated people, but there is the other face of the medal: an educated person needed to have at least a working knowledge of Latin.
Ahhh, yes. I recall that a married couple couldn't speak to each other because, while they both knew latin, they had different pronunciations based upon where they came from. So a lot of the importance of Latin came in writing, I would say. I just wonder if they would have managed to come up with some internationally recognized group to catalouge the expansion of the language to add in new words.

BTW, please can we avoid the term "Black Legend" on here, like it was a thing.
Wasn't it a well recognized term in history? Or are you questioning the validity either of the claims or of people having actually made the claims in a contemporary setting? I think we can treat it on a similar layer to the Blood Libel. Meaning that people in the comteporary period believed it was true.
 
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Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
Wasn't it a well recognized term in history? Or are you questioning the validity either of the claims or of people having actually made the claims in a contemporary setting? I think we can treat it on a similar layer to the Blood Libel. Meaning that people in the comteporary period believed it was true.

The Black Legend is a term invented in around 1900 to describe what the Spanish believed was wrong with the way other countries saw them. It is actually more to do with the way they saw themselves, but that's by-the-by. The idea was very strongly promoted during the Franco time, and like so many aspects of that period was never properly dismantled.

It's incredibly hard to pin down why the Black Legend is a legend, most of the activities involved in the Black Legend (enslavement, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, sadism, sexual violence sexual slavery) clearly happened, and are most frequently documented by the perpetrators. It seems to relate to the idea that, as these atrocities were used in anti-spanish propaganda in the past, they shouldn't be talked about now.

Anyway, it is more often used without even thinking about what it might mean, to shut down discussion on the aspects of colonial history that nationalist Spaniards don't want to talk about.
 
Wasn't it a well recognized term in history? Or are you questioning the validity either of the claims or of people having actually made the claims in a contemporary setting? I think we can treat it on a similar layer to the Blood Libel. Meaning that people in the comteporary period believed it was true.

If only it was a past belief. It's still an ongoing concern like the Lost Cause.
 
I would like to add to your points.
The first Iberian kingdom to be a European power was the Kingdom of Aragon. Its possessions outside of Spain include the Two Sicilies, Malta and the Duchy of Athens, which was a crusader state. Another attempt was with the ascent of Charles the V from the House of Habsburg, it combined the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain's possessions of Europe and the Americas.
I'm afraid I'm completely missing your point
 
As others have said France was the cultural powerhouse of Europe from the early the middle ages e.g. Franks while Spain only has a brief period in the sun and even then Spanish isn't really the way to describe the Hapsburg Empire. The Henry IV ruled his lands as King of France, Philip II ruled Castile as King of Castile, Aragon as King of Aragon, the 17 provinces as Duke of Burgundy, Count of Flanders etc.
Castilian Spanish wasn't even the common language of nobility of the Empire, in the low countries and Italy that was French, while Parisian French was universal among the French aristocracy.
 
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