As Spain expanded its colonial empire, Spanish language and culture were introduced throughout the colonies. In this contribution, Ithe author explores the socio-historical factors that led to Spanish becoming a global language. From an evolutionary perspective, it is proposed that the arrival of an Old World cultural and linguistic community to the New World was the introduction of an invasive cultural and linguistic community into a new environment not equipped to handle it. This collision of cultures and languages led to an unintended result, the large-scale decimation of the indigenous communities, described by Diamond (1999: 354) as the ‘largest population replacement in the last 13,000 years'. Another, related consequence was that the Spanish language dominated during the colonial period, and since has continued to be the de facto main or exclusive language as the colonies became nation states. It has also been instrumental in a wide variety of political movements, as well as in the development of cultural expression. While being the second most widely spoken world language, Spanish regional varieties have emerged that reflect the local linguistic ecologies of areas where they are spoken.

Spain never managed to take control of the Sulu Archipelago, where the Sulu Sultanate thrived, particularly after c.1770, on a combination of trade and slave raiding. Maritime raiding was a central means of warfare for both the Sulu Sultanate and Spain during the protracted Moro Wars from 1565 to 1876, but from the second half of the eighteenth century, Spain began increasingly to label their adversaries 'pirates'. From the 1840s the Spanish Navy began to gain the upper hand in the struggle at sea, leading to a sharp decline in large-scale piracy and coastal raiding from the middle of the century. The lack of international recognition of Spain’s territorial claims over the Sulu Sultanate, however, hindered naval cooperation with the British and the Dutch for the purpose of suppressing piracy, which allowed petty piratical activity emanating from the Sulu Sea to continue. The United States took over Spain’s colony in the Philippines in 1899 and managed initially to maintain reasonable maritime security, although attacks against indigenous fishermen and Chinese traders and pearl fishers continued. Between 1907 and 1909 the last serious outbreak of piracy in the area occurred with the depredations of Jikiri and his band, which the Americans only defeated with considerable difficulty.