3.5 Historical Causes of Diffusion

Colonialism is when a country takes control of another territory, often sending settlers and running its government and economy. Imperialism is the broader effort to extend power over other peoples, whether by colonies, military force or economic control.

European colonial empires from the 1500s to the mid-1900s left a lasting cultural map. Spanish is spoken across most of Latin America, and Portuguese in Brazil, Angola and Mozambique. French is an official language in many West and Central African countries, Haiti and Quebec. English spread to North America, Australia, India, Nigeria and many other places. Christianity spread with missionaries, which is why most people in Latin America and the Philippines, a Spanish colony from 1565 to 1898, are Christian.

Colonial powers often imposed their language in schools and government and pushed aside local languages and religions. Many former colonies kept a colonial language after independence as a neutral common language across many ethnic groups, as Nigeria did with English.

• The Silk Roads carried Buddhism from India into Central Asia and China, along with goods like silk and paper.
• Indian Ocean trade brought Islam to coastal East Africa and to Southeast Asia. Muslim merchants from Arabia, Persia and India traded in the ports of present-day Indonesia and Malaysia, and Islam spread there over several centuries. Indonesia now has more Muslims than any other country.
• Trans-Saharan caravan trade carried Islam to West African kingdoms like Mali.
• The Columbian Exchange after 1492 moved crops and animals across the Atlantic. Tomatoes reached Italy, potatoes became central to diets in Ireland and Eastern Europe, and chili peppers from the Americas transformed food in India, Thailand and Korea.

Creolization is the blending of different cultures into a new, distinct one. It often happened where colonizers, enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples lived together, as in the Caribbean.

With language, it often starts with a pidgin, a simplified language that people with no common language use to trade, with no native speakers. When a pidgin becomes the first language of a new generation and grows more complex, it is a creole. Haitian Creole is based mostly on French vocabulary with strong West African influences. Jamaican Patois and Gullah, spoken on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, are English-based creoles. Creolization also shows up in music, food and religion.

A lingua franca is a language people use to communicate when they don't share a first language. Latin played this role among educated Europeans in the Middle Ages. Swahili, a Bantu language with many Arabic loanwords from centuries of Indian Ocean trade, is a lingua franca across much of East Africa. English is the world's main lingua franca today in business, science, tourism and aviation, where it is the standard language of international air traffic control.