Heretical Multilingualisms

In 1584, a boy faced heresy charges for teaching a sexualised version of a Catholic prayer in Tagalog to his stepmother’s Bisaya-speaking slaves. His trial, among the first cases from the Philippines to be reported to the Inquisition in Mexico, reveals the anxieties of the residents of Spanish Manila over the multilingual spaces they inhabited. Interweaving this story in a history of language contact between Spanish and various Philippine languages, I examine translation in this essay as a tool for policing linguistic diversity. I first describe how precolonial and pericolonial multilingualisms interacted with Spanish as a politically hegemonic yet demographically restricted language. I then analyse translation norms from the period, relating them to a productive hysteria over heterodoxy that shaped language usage in an emerging Hispano-Asian world around the Pacific.