Parts of Speech: Essays on English

Two apparently contradictory tendencies are to-day visible. One of them is revealed by our increasing interest in the less important languages and in the more important dialects. The other is to be seen in the immense expansion of the several peoples using the three or four most widely spoken European tongues, an expansion rapidly giving them a supremacy which renders hopeless any attempt of the less important European languages ever to equal them. (It may be noted now once for all that in this paper only the Indo-European languages are taken into account, altho Arabic did succeed for a while in making itself the chief tongue of the Mediterranean basin, overrunning Sicily and even thrusting itself up into Spain, and altho Chinese may have a fateful expansion in the dark future.)

As an instance of the first of the two conflicting tendencies, we have in France the movement of the félibres to revive Provençal, and to make it again a fit vehicle for poetry. We have in Norway an effort to differentiate written Norwegian from the Danish, which has hitherto been accepted as the standard speech of all Scandinavian authors. We have in Belgium an increasing resistance to French, which is the official tongue, and an attempt arbitrarily to resuscitate the Flemish dialect. We have in Switzerland a desire to keep alive the primitive and moribund Romansh. We have in North Britain a demand for at least a professorship of broad Scots. We see also that, among the languages of the smaller nations, neither Dutch nor Portuguese shows any symptoms of diminishing vitality, while Rumanian has been suddenly encouraged by the political independence of the people speaking it.

All this is curious and interesting; and yet at the very period when these developments are in progress, other influences are at work on behalf of the languages of the greater races. The developments noted above are largely the work of scholars and of students; they are the artificial products of provincial pride; and they are destined to defeat by forces as invincible as those of nature itself. In their different degrees Provençal and Flemish are struggling for existence against French; but French itself is not gaining in its old rivalry with English and with German.

At the end of the seventeenth century French was the language of diplomacy; it was the speech of the courts of Europe; it was the one modern tongue an educated man in England or in Germany, in Spain or in Italy, needed to acquire. As Latin had been the world-language in the days of the Empire, so French bade fair to be the world-language in the days when all the parts of the earth should be bound together by the bands of commerce and finance. In the eighteenth century the supremacy of French was still indisputable; but in the nineteenth century it disappeared. And, unless all calculations of probability fail us, somewhere in the twentieth century French will have fallen from the first place to the fifth, just below Spanish, just above Italian, and far, far beneath English and Russian and German.

It was the social instinct of the French which made their language so neat, so apt for epigram and compliment, so admirable and so adequate for criticism; and it was the energy of the English-speaking peoples, their individuality, their independence, which made our language so sturdy, so vigorous, so powerful.

An excess of the social instinct it is which has kept the French at home, close to the borders of France, and which has thus restricted the expansion of their language, while it is also an excess of the energy of our stock that has scattered English all over the world, on every shore of all the seven seas. And now that the nineteenth century has drawn to an end, if we can guess at the future from our acquaintance with the past, we are justified in believing that the world-language at the end of the twentieth century—should any one tongue succeed in winning universal acceptance—will be English. If it is not English, then it will not be German or Spanish or French; it will be Russian.

This attempt to foretell the future is not a random venture or a reckless brag; it is based on a comparison of the number of people speaking the different European languages at different periods. At my request Mr. N. I. Stone, of the School of Political Science of Columbia University, made an examination of the statistics, in so far as they are obtainable. The figures are rarely absolutely trustworthy before the nineteenth century—indeed, they are sometimes little better than guesswork. Yet they are approximately accurate, and they will serve fairly well for purposes of comparison. They make plain the way in which one language has gained on another in the past; and they afford material for us to hazard a prediction as to the languages likely to gain most in the immediate future.

In the fourteenth century the population of France was about ten millions, and that of the British Isles probably less than four millions. In both territories there were certainly many who did not speak the chief language; yet the proportion of those who spoke French to those who spoke English was at least ten to four.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century the British Isles still had less than four millions, while France had more than twelve millions. At this same period Italy had a few more than nine millions, and Spain a few less, while the Germans (including always the Austrians who spoke German) were about ten millions.

Coming toward the end of the sixteenth century, we find six millions in the British Isles, more than fourteen millions in France and in the French-speaking portions of the adjacent countries, and more than ten millions in Italy. The Russians then numbered nearly four millions and a half—only a million and a half less than the British.

At the very end of the seventeenth century the number of those speaking English was nearly eight millions and a half—most of them still in the British Isles, but some of them already departed into the colonies in America and elsewhere. The number of those speaking French was twenty millions, of those speaking Italian a few less than twelve millions, and of those speaking Russian about fifteen millions. Those speaking Spanish were chiefly at home in the Iberian peninsula, but not a few were in the colonies in America: they amounted to about eight millions in all, the mother-country having wasted her people in ruinous wars.

At the very end of the eighteenth century we find the English-speaking peoples on both shores of the Atlantic swollen to twenty-two millions, having nearly trebled in a hundred years, while the French had added only a third to their population, amounting in all to a few more than twenty-seven millions. The Germans were about thirty-three millions, having passed the French; and the Italians were a few more than thirteen millions, having increased very slowly. Neither Germans nor Italians had as yet been able either to achieve unity for themselves or to found colonies elsewhere. The Spanish, including their pure-blooded colonists, numbered perhaps ten millions. The Russians had increased to twenty-five millions, the boundaries of their empire having been widely extended.

The nineteenth century was a period of unexampled expansion for the English-speaking race, who have spread to India, to Australia, and to Africa, besides filling up the western parts of the United States; they now number probably between a hundred and twenty-five and a hundred and thirty millions. The Russians have also pushed their borders across Asia, and they also show an immense increase, now numbering about a hundred and thirty millions, altho probably a very large proportion of their conglomerate population does not yet speak Russian. The Germans have supplied millions of immigrants to the United States, and thousands of expatriated traders to all the great cities of the world; and in spite of this loss they now number about seventy millions (including, as before, the German portions of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy). The Spanish-speaking peoples in the old world and the new are about forty-two millions, not half of them being in Spain itself.

The French lag far behind in this multiplication; they number now a few more than forty millions, including those Belgians and Swiss who have French for their mother-tongue. The relative loss of the French can best be shown by a comparison with the English after an interval of five hundred years. In the fourteenth century, as we have seen, those who spoke French were to those who spoke English as ten to four; in the nineteenth century those who speak English are to those who speak French as one hundred and thirty to forty. In other words, the French during five centuries have increased fourfold, while the English have multiplied more than thirtyfold.

French is still the language most frequently employed by diplomatists; it is still the tongue in which educated men of differing nationalities are most likely to be able to converse with each other. But its supremacy has departed forever. It has long been fighting a losing battle. Its hope of becoming the world-language of the future vanished, never to reappear, when Clive grasped India and when Wolfe defeated Montcalm. At a brief interval the French let slip their final chances of holding either the east or the west.

The English-speaking peoples and the Russians have entered into the inheritance which the French have renounced. The future is theirs, for they are ready to go forth and subdue the waste places of the earth. They are the great civilizing forces of the twentieth century, each in its own way and each in its own degree. The Russians have revealed a remarkable faculty of assimilation, and have taken over the wild tribes of the east, which they are slowly starting along the path of progress. The English—by which I mean always the peoples who speak the English language—have possessed themselves of North America and of South Africa and of Australia; and there is no sign yet visible of any lack of energy or of any decrease of vigor in the branches of this hardy and prolific stock.

At the rate of increase of the nineteenth century, the end of the twentieth century will find eight hundred and forty millions speaking English and five hundred millions speaking Russian, while those who speak German will be one hundred and thirty millions and those who speak French perhaps sixty millions. But it is very unlikely that the rate of increase in the twentieth century will be what it was in the nineteenth. The extraordinary expansion of the United States is the salient phenomenon of the nineteenth century; and it is doubtfully possible and certainly improbable that any such expansion can take place in the twentieth century, even in South Africa. On the other hand, the building of the Siberian railroad may open to the Russians an outlet for the overflow of their population not unlike that offered to the English by the opening of the middle west of the United States. The outpouring of Germans, hitherto directed chiefly to the United States (where they have been taught to speak English), may perhaps hereafter be diverted to German colonies, where the native tongue will be cherished.

Thus it seems likely that, while the estimate for the year 2000 of one hundred and thirty million Germans is none too large, that of five hundred million Russians is perhaps too small, and that of eight hundred and fifty millions for the English-speaking peoples is probably highly inflated. What, however, we have no reasonable right to doubt is that German will be a bad third, as French will be a bad fourth; and that the English language and the Russian will stand far at the head of the list, one all-powerful in the west and the other all-powerful in the east. Which of them will prevail against the other in the twenty-first century no man can now foretell, nor can he get any help from statistics.

The issue of that conflict cannot be foreseen by any inspection of figures, for it will turn not so much on mere numbers—altho the possession of these will be an immense advantage: it will be decided rather by the race-characteristics of the two stocks when thrust into irresistible opposition. The manners and customs of the people who speak Russian and of the peoples who speak English, their physical strength and their vitality, their ideals, social and political—all these things will be the decisive factors in the final combat. Whether Russian or English shall be the world-language of the future depends not on the language itself and its merits and demerits, but on the sturdiness of those who shall then speak it, on their strength of will, on their power of organization, on their readiness to sacrifice themselves for the common cause, and on their fidelity to their ideals.

Russian is a beautiful language, so those say who know it best: it is fresh and vigorous, as might be expected in a speech the literature of which is not yet old; it is also as clear and as direct as French. But it has one insuperable disadvantage: its grammar is as primitive and as complex as the grammar of German or the grammar of Greek. The verb has an elaborate conjugation, the noun an elaborate declension, the adjective an elaborate method of agreement in gender, number, and case.

Now English is fortunate in having discarded nearly all this primitive machinery, which is always a sign of linguistic immaturity. The English language has shed almost all its unnecessary complications; it has advanced from complexity toward simplicity, while Russian still lingers in its unreformed condition of arbitrary elaboration. One objection, it may be noted, to Volapük, which a German scholar kindly invented as the world-language of the future, was that its grammar was of this primitive and complicated type.

In these days of the printing-press and of the schoolmaster any radical modification of the mother-tongue is increasingly difficult, so that it is highly improbable that Russian can now ever shake off these grammatical encumbrances that really unfit it for use as a world-language to be acquired by all men. Russian is one of the most backward of modern languages in its progress toward grammatical simplicity; and English is one of the most forward. Italian is also a language which had the good fortune partly to reform its grammar before the invention of printing made the operation almost impossible; and Italian is like English in that it is a very easy language to learn by word of mouth, as the rules of grammar we must needs obey are very few,—tho in this respect English is superior even to Italian. If English is hard to learn when it is taught by the eye instead of the ear, this is because of our cumbersome and antiquated spelling; here the Italian is far better off than the English.

Indeed, it is not a little strange that the English language, which is one of the most advanced in grammatical simplicity, is one of the most belated in orthographic simplicity. In no other modern language is the system of spelling—if system that can be called which has no rule or reason—more arbitrary and more chaotic than in English; and no other peculiarity of our language does more to retard its diffusion than its wantonly foolish orthography.

Probably much of the violent opposition to the simplification of our spelling is due to the fanatic zeal of the phonetic reformers, who have frightened away all the timid respecters of tradition by their rash insistence upon the immediate adoption of some brand-new and comprehensive scheme. The English-speaking peoples are essentially conservative and unfailingly opportunist; they abhor all radical remedies. They are wont to remove ancient abuses piecemeal, and not root and branch. The most they can be got to do in the immediate future is to follow the example of the Italians, and to lop off gradually the most flagrant inconsistencies and absurdities of our present spelling, here a little and there a little, going forward hesitatingly, but never stopping.

In this good work of injecting a little more sense into our orthography, as in the other good work of still further simplifying our grammar as occasion serves and opportunity offers, we Americans may have to take the lead. The English language is ours by inheritance, and our interest in it is as deep and as wide as that of our British cousins. As Mark Twain has put it, with his customary shrewdness, it is “the King’s English” no longer, for it has gone into the hands of a company, and a majority of the stock is held on our side of the Atlantic.

We Americans must awake to a sense of our responsibility as the chief of the English-speaking peoples. The tie that binds the British colonies to the British crown is strong only because it is loose; and in Australia and in Canada the conditions of life resemble those of the United States rather than those of Great Britain. The British Isles are the birthplace of our race, but they no longer contain the most important branch of the English-speaking peoples. On both sides of the Atlantic, and afar in the Pacific also, and along the shores of the Indian Ocean, are “the subjects of King Shakspere,” the students of Chaucer and Dryden, the readers of Scott and Thackeray and Hawthorne; but most of them, or at least the largest single group, will be in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, as they are at the end of the nineteenth.

No one has more clearly seen the essential unity of the English-speaking race, and no one has more accurately stated the relation of the American branch of this race to the British branch, than the late John Richard Green. In his chapter on the independence of America, he recorded the fact that since 1776 “the life of the English people has flowed not in one current, but in two; and while the older has shown little sign of lessening, the younger has fast risen to a greatness which has changed the face of the world. In wealth and material energy, as in numbers, it far surpasses the mother-country from which it sprang. It is already the main branch of the English people; and in the days that are at hand the main current of that people’s history must run along the channel, not of the Thames or the Mersey, but of the Hudson and the Mississippi.”

When English becomes the world-language,—if our speech ever is raised to fill that position of honor and usefulness,—it will be the English language as it is spoken by all the branches of the English race, no doubt; but the dominant influence in deciding what the future of that language shall be must come from the United States. The English of the future will be the English that we shall use here in the United States; and it is for us to hand it down to our children fitted for the service it is to render.

This task is ours, not to be undertaken boastfully or vaingloriously or in any spirit of provincial self-assertion, on the one hand, or of colonial self-depreciation on the other, but with a full sense of the burden imposed upon us and of the privilege that accompanies it. It is our duty to do what we can to keep our English speech fresh and vigorous, to help it draw new life and power from every proper source, to resist all the attempts of pedants to cramp it and restrain its healthy growth, and to urge along the simplification of its grammar and its orthography, so that it shall be ready against the day when it is really a world-language.