The Cultural Translation of Language

The Cultural Translation of Language examines how language itself became an object of cultural translation in colonial Mexico. Focusing on multilingual encounters in missionary contexts, it asks how speech, language, and communication were perceived, named, compared, and explained.

The book focuses on the late 17th and 18th centuries to show how multilingual communication was maintained and gradually transformed under colonial rule. Additionally, rather than analysing metalinguistic discourses in isolation, it reconstructs the everyday practices that produced them. These include learning and teaching languages, recording them, defining authoritative forms of speech, and debating language-based attributions of belonging, both within New Spain and across the Atlantic. Arguing that practices developed in these contested and highly multilingual settings not only shaped the emerging field of linguistics but also enduring, widespread assumptions about what languages are, how they relate to one another, and how they define those who speak them. It thus moves beyond the history of New Spain or the Jesuit missions to address a broader question: how do people talk about language, and how do these conversations shape social order?

Bringing together cultural history, the history of knowledge, linguistics, and translation studies, the book will be of interest to students and scholars in these fields, while also offering a new perspective for readers interested in colonialism, multilingualism, and the history of language.