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.
(1898)
III
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNITED STATES
When Benjamin Franklin was in England in 1760, he received a letter
from David Hume commenting on the style of an essay of his writing and
on his choice of words; and in his reply Franklin modestly thanked his
friend for the criticism, and took occasion to declare his hope that
we Americans would always “make the best English of this island our
standard.” And yet when France acknowledged the independence of the
United States in 1778 and Franklin was sent to Paris as our minister,
Congress duly considered the proper forms and ceremonies to be observed
in doing business with foreign countries, and finally resolved that
“all speeches or communications may, if the public ministers choose it,
be in the language of their respective countries; and all replies or
answers shall be in the language of the United States.”
What is “the language of the United States”? Is it “the best English”
of Great Britain, as Franklin hoped it would always be? Franklin
was unusually far-sighted, but even he could not foresee what is
perhaps the most extraordinary event of the nineteenth century,--an
era abounding in the extraordinary,--the marvelous spread and immense
expansion of the English language. It is not only along the banks of
the Thames and the Tweed and the Shannon that children are now losing
irrecoverable hours on the many absurdities of English orthography: a
like wanton wastefulness there is also on the shores of the Hudson,
of the Mississippi, and of the Columbia, while the same A B C’s are
parroted by the little ones of those who live where the Ganges rolls
down its yellow sand and of those who dwell in the great island which
is almost riverless. No parallel can be found in history for this
sudden spreading out of the English language in the past hundred
years--not even the diffusion of Latin during the century when the rule
of Rome was most widely extended.
Among the scattered millions who now employ our common speech, in
England itself, in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, in the United
States and Canada, in India and in Australia, in Egypt and in South
Africa, there is no stronger bond of union than the language itself.
There is no likelihood that any political association will ever
be sought or achieved. The tie that fastens the more independent
colonies to the mother-country is loose enough now, even if it is
never further relaxed; and less than half of those who have English
for their mother-tongue owe any allegiance whatever to England. The
English-speaking inhabitants of the British Empire are apparently fewer
than the inhabitants of the American republic; and the population
of the United Kingdom itself is only a little more than half the
population of the United States.
To set down these facts is to point out that the English language is
no longer a personal possession of the people of England. The power of
the head of the British Empire over what used to be called the “King’s
English” is now as little recognized as his power over what used to be
called the “king’s evil.” We may regret that this is the case, or we
may rejoice at it; but we cannot well deny the fact itself. And thus
we are face to face with more than one very interesting question. What
is going to become of the language now it is thus dispersed abroad and
freed from all control by a central authority and exposed to all sorts
of alien influences? Is it bound to become corrupted and to sink from
its high estate into a mire of slang and into a welter of barbarously
fashioned verbal novelties? What, more especially, is going to be the
future of the English language here in America? Must we fear the dread
possibility that the speech of the peoples on the opposite sides of
the Western Ocean will diverge at last until the English language will
divide into two branches, those who speak British being hardly able to
understand those who speak American, and those who speak American being
hardly able to understand those who speak British? Mark Twain is a
humorist, it is true, but he is very shrewd and he has abundant common
sense; and it was Mark Twain who declared a score of years ago that he
spoke the “American language.”
The science of linguistics is among the youngest, and yet it has
already established itself so firmly on the solid ground of ascertained
truth that it has been able to overthrow with ease one and another
of the many theories which were accepted without question before it
came into being. For example, time was--and the time is not so very
remote, it may be remarked--time was when the little group of more or
less highly educated men who were at the center of authority in the
capital of any nation had no doubt whatsoever as to the superiority
of their way of speaking their own language over the manner in which
it might be spoken by the vast majority of their fellow-citizens
deprived of the advantages of a court training. This little group set
the standard of speech; and the standard they set was accepted as
final and not to be tampered with under penalty of punishment for the
crime of lese-majesty. They held that any divergence from the customs
of speaking and writing they themselves cherished was due to ignorance
and probably to obstinacy. They believed that the court dialect which
they had been brought up to use was the only true and original form of
the language; and they swiftly stigmatized as a gross impropriety every
usage and every phrase with which they themselves did not happen to be
familiar. And in thus maintaining the sole validity of their personal
habits of speech they had no need for self-assertion, since it never
entered into the head of any one not belonging to the court circle to
question for a second the position thus tacitly declared.
Yet if modern methods of research have made anything whatever
indisputable in the history of human speech, they have completely
disproved the assumption which underlies this implicit claim of the
courtiers. We know now that the urban dialect is not the original
language of which the rural dialects are but so many corruptions.
We know, indeed, that the rural dialects are often really closer
to the original tongue than the urban dialect; and that the urban
dialect itself was once as rude as its fellows, and that it owes its
preëminence rarely to any superiority of its own over its rivals, but
rather to the fact that it chanced to be the speech of a knot of men
more masterful than the inhabitants of any other village, and able
therefore to expand their village to a town and at last to a city,
which imposed its rule on the neighboring villages, the inhabitants of
these being by that time forgetful that they had once striven with it
on almost equal terms. Generally it is the stability given by political
pre-eminence which leads to the development of a literature, without
which no dialect can retain its linguistic supremacy.
When the sturdy warriors whose homes were clustered on one or another
of the seven hills of Rome began to make alliances and conquests, they
rendered possible the future development of their rough Italic into the
Latin language which has left its mark on almost every modern European
tongue. The humble allies of the early Romans, who possessed dialects
of an equal antiquity and of an equal possibility of improvement, could
not but obey the laws of imitation; and they sought, perforce, to
bring their vocabulary and their syntax into conformity with that of
the men who had shown themselves more powerful. Thus one of the Italic
dialects was singled out by fortune for an extraordinary future, and
the other Italic dialects were left in obscurity, altho they were each
of them as old as the Roman and as available for development. These
other dialects have even suffered the ignominy of being supposed to be
corruptions of their triumphant brother.
The French philologist Darmesteter concisely explained the stages of
this development of one local speech at the expense of its neighbors.
As it gains in dignity its fellows fall into the shadow. A local speech
thus neglected is a patois; and a local speech which achieves the
dignity of literature is a dialect. These written tongues spread on
all sides and impose themselves on the surrounding population as more
noble than the patois. Thus a linguistic province is created, and its
dialect tends constantly to crush out the various patois once freely
used within its boundaries.
In time one of these provinces becomes politically more powerful than
the others and extends its rule over one after another of them. As
it does this, its dialect replaces the dialects of the provinces as
the official tongue, and it tends constantly to crush out these other
dialects, as they had tended constantly to crush out the various
patois. Thus the local speech of the population of the tiny island in
the Seine, which is the nucleus of the city of Paris, rose slowly to
the dignity of a written dialect, and the local speech of each of the
neighboring villages sank into a patois--altho originally it was in no
wise inferior. In the course of centuries Paris became the capital of
France, and its provincial dialect became the official language of the
kingdom. When the kings of France extended their rule over Normandy
and over Burgundy and over Provence, the Parisian dialect succeeded in
imposing itself upon the inhabitants of those provinces as superior;
and in time the Norman dialect and the Burgundian and the Provençal
were ousted.
The dialect of the province in which the king dwelt and in which the
business of governing was carried on, could not but dispossess the
dialects of all the other provinces; and thus the French language,
as we know it now, was once only the Parisian dialect. Yet there was
apparently no linguistic inferiority of the _langue d’oc_ to the
_langue d’oil_; and the reasons for the dominion of the one and the
decadence of the other are purely political. Of course, as the Parisian
dialect grew and spread itself, it was enriched by locutions from the
other provincial dialects, and it was simplified by the dropping of
many of its grammatical complexities not common to the most of the
others.
The French language was developed from one particular provincial
dialect probably no better adapted for improvement than any one of half
a dozen others; but it is to-day an instrument of precision infinitely
finer than any of its pristine rivals, since they had none of them
the good fortune to be chosen for development. But the patois of the
peasant of Normandy or of Brittany, however inadequate it may be as a
means of expression for a modern man, is not a corruption of French,
any more than Doric is a corruption of Attic Greek. It is rather in the
position of a twin brother disinherited by the guile of his fellow,
more adroit in getting the good will of their parents. It was the
literary skill of the Athenians themselves, and not the superiority
of the original dialect, that makes us think of Attic as the only
genuine Greek, just as it was the prowess of the Romans in war and
their power of governing which raised their provincial dialect into the
language of Italy, and then carried it triumphant to every shore of the
Mediterranean.
The history of the development of the English language is like the
history of the development of Greek and Latin and French; and the
English language as we speak it to-day is a growth from the Midland
dialect, itself the victor of a struggle for survivorship with the
Southern and Northern dialects. “With the accession of the royal house
of Wessex to the rule of Teutonic England,” so Professor Lounsbury
tells us, “the dialect of Wessex had become the cultivated language of
the whole people--the language in which books were written and laws
were published.” But when the Norman conquest came, altho, to quote
from Professor Lounsbury again, “the native tongue continued to be
spoken by the great majority of the population, it went out of use as
the language of high culture,” and “the educated classes, whether lay
or ecclesiastical, preferred to write either in Latin or in French--the
latter steadily tending more and more to become the language of
literature as well as of polite society.” And as a result of this the
West-Saxon had to drop to the low level of the other dialects; “it had
no longer any preëminence of its own.” There was in England from the
twelfth to the fourteenth centuries no national language, but every one
was free to use with tongue and pen his own local speech, altho three
provincial dialects existed, “each possessing a literature of its own
and each seemingly having about the same chance to be adopted as the
representative national speech.”
These three dialects were the Southern (which was the descendant of
Wessex, once on the way to supremacy), the Northern, and the Midland
(which had the sole advantage that it was a compromise between its
neighbors to the north and the south). London was situated in the
region of the Midland dialect, and it was therefore “the tongue mainly
employed at the court” when French slowly ceased to be the language
of the upper classes. As might be expected in those days before the
printing-press and the spelling-book imposed uniformity, the Midland
dialect was spoken somewhat differently in the Eastern counties from
the way it was spoken in the Western counties of the region. London
was in the Eastern division of the Midland dialect, and London was
the capital. Probably because the speech of the Eastern division of
the Midland dialect was the speech of the capital, it was used as the
vehicle of his verse by an officer of the court--who happened also to
be a great poet and a great literary artist. Just as Dante’s choice of
his native Tuscan dialect controlled the future development of Italian,
so Chaucer’s choice controlled the future development of English. It
was Chaucer, so Professor Lounsbury declares, “who first showed to all
men the resources of the language, its capacity of representing with
discrimination all shades of human thought and of conveying with power
all manifestations of human feeling.”
The same writer tells us that “the cultivated English language, in
which nearly all English literature of value has been written, sprang
directly from the East-Midland division of the Midland dialect, and
especially from the variety of the East-Midland which was spoken at
London and the region immediately to the north of it.” That this
magnificent opportunity came to the London dialect was not due to any
superiority it had over any other variety of the Midland dialect: it
was due to the single fact that it was the speech of the capital--just
as the dialect of the Île-de-France in like manner served as the stem
from which the cultivated French language sprang. The Parisian dialect
flourished and imposed itself on all sides; within the present limits
of France it choked out the other local dialects, even the soft and
lovely Provençal; and beyond the boundaries of the country it was
accepted in Belgium and in Switzerland.
So the dialect of London has gone on growing and refining and enriching
itself as the people who spoke it extended their borders and passed
over the wide waters and won their way to far countries, until to-day
it serves not merely for the cockney Tommy Atkins, the cow-boy of
Montana, and the larrikin of Melbourne: it is adequate for the various
needs of the Scotch philosopher and of the American humorist; it is
employed by the Viceroy of India, the Sirdar of Egypt, the governor of
Alaska, and the general in command over the Philippines. In the course
of some six centuries the dialect of a little town on the Thames has
become the mother-tongue of millions and millions of people scattered
broadcast over the face of the earth.
If the Norman conquest had not taken place the history of the English
race would be very different, and the English language would not be
what it is, since it would have had for its root the Wessex variety
of the Southern dialect. But the Norman conquest did take place, and
the English language has for its root the Eastern division of the
Midland dialect. The Norman conquest it was which brought the modest
but vigorous young English tongue into close contact with the more
highly cultivated French. The French spoken in England was rather the
Norman dialect than the Parisian (which is the true root of modern
French), and whatever slight influence English may have had upon it
does not matter now, for it was destined to a certain death. But this
Norman-French enlarged the plastic English speech against which it was
pressing; and English adopted many French words, not borrowing them,
but making them our own, once for all, and not dropping the original
English word, but keeping both with slight divergence of meaning.
Thus it is in part to the Norman conquest that we owe the double
vocabulary wherein our language surpasses all others. While the
framework of English is Teutonic, we have for many things two names,
one of Germanic origin and one of Romance. Our direct, homely words,
that go straight to our hearts and nestle there--these are most of
them Teutonic. Our more delicate words, subtle in finer shades of
meaning--these often come to us from the Latin through the French.
The secondary words are of Romance origin, and the primary words of
Germanic. And this--if the digression may here be hazarded--is one
reason why French poetry touches us less than German, the words of the
former seeming to us remote, not to say sophisticated, while the words
of the latter are akin to our own simpler and swifter words.