Language and the Study of Language/Lecture IV

by William Dwight Whitney

LECTURE IV.

Varying rate and kind of linguistic growth, and causes affecting it. Modes of growth of the English language. Influences conservative of linguistic identity. Causes producing dialects; causes maintaining, producing, or extending homogeneity of speech. Illustrations: history of the German language; of the Latin; of the English. The English language in America.

We have, in the last two lectures, occupied ourselves with tracing out and illustrating by typical examples the chief processes of that incessant change, that linguistic growth, which marks a language as living, as undergoing, in the minds and mouths of a community, constant adaptation to their needs, constant adjustment to their preferences and caprices. These processes, as we saw, have to do both with the external form of speech, its spoken and audible body, and with its internal content, its intended and apprehensible meaning. As regards the former, they appeared to be of two general kinds or classes: on the one hand, they partake of the nature of corruption and decay, consisting in the abbreviation and mutilation of existing words, the wearing off of formative elements and consequent loss of forms, the abandonment of old distinctions along with the means of their expression, the dying out of words and phrases from memory and use; on the other hand, they are of the nature of growth, providing for the repair of this waste, and the supply of new additions to the resources of expression, by the putting together of old material into fresh combinations, the elaboration of formative elements out of words possessing independent significance, and the application of accidental differences to the practical uses of significant distinction. And this external decay and growth is accompanied by, and accessory to, a rich and ever-progressing development of ideal content, which deals at its will with all the material of speech, which contracts, expands, and transfers the meanings of words, which converts the physical and concrete into the intellectual and abstract, which produces variety out of sameness, and is never at a loss for means whereby to provide with its suitable sign any fresh acquisition to the sum of things known, any new conception or deduction. In continuing at present our discussion of the life of language, we have first to note the varying rate at which the processes of growth go on, and to bring to light some of the circumstances which affect their progress.

The fact of variation in the rate of linguistic growth, it may be remarked by way of introduction, is a very obvious one. Our own English has changed much less during the past two hundred and fifty years than during the like period next preceding; and vastly less in the last five centuries than during the five which went before them. The German of the present day is not more altered from the ancient type of Germanic speech than was the English of six or seven centuries ago; nor the Icelandic now current than the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred and his predecessors. The modern Romanic dialects—the Spanish, French, Italian, and the rest—have deviated far more widely from the Latin of Cicero and Virgil than has the dialect of the Greeks from that of Cicero's Hellenic contemporaries; and they differ from one another not a little in the degree, as well as in the mode, of their respective deviation. To go somewhat further from home, the Arabic of the Bedouin in this century is incomparably more nearly identical with that of the tribes through whose borders the children of Israel were led by Moses than is any one of our contemporary European tongues with its ancestor of the same remote period. And there are to be found upon the face of the earth dialects which are even now so rapidly changing that those who speak them would be unable to converse with either their ancestors or their descendants across an interval of four or five generations.

Now the particular modes and departments of linguistic change are so diverse that no one cause, or kind of causes, can affect them all, or affect them all alike, either to quicken or to retard them. But the plainest and most apprehensible influence is that which is exerted by change of external circumstances, surroundings, mode of life, mental and physical activity, customs and habits; and to this, accordingly, we will first direct our attention. How powerfully such causes may act upon language will be best shown, perhaps, by imagining an extreme case. Suppose an illiterate English family to be cast away upon a coral islet in the Pacific, and to be left there isolated through a succession of generations. How much of our language would at once begin to become useless to them! All that is connected with variety of scenery, as hill and dale, as rock and river; with diversity of season, of temperature, of skyey influences; with wealth of animal and vegetable life; with multifariousness of experience, of occupation, of material, of production—and much more, which it is needless to specify. For a certain period, some part of this might be kept alive by memory and tradition, but not for ever; it would lose its distinctness before the mind, become shadowy, and by degrees die out; and its loss would be facilitated by that stupefying effect which the climate and mode of life, with their restricted limits and dull uniformity, would unavoidably have upon the mind; vigour of thought and liveliness of sentiment would be likely to decline; and, after the lapse of a sufficient period to allow these causes their full effect, the wealth of English speech might be reduced to a poverty comparable with that of some among the present Polynesian dialects. But suppose, on the other hand, a Polynesian family set down in the midst of a country like Iceland, amid magnificent and terrible scenery, amid varieties of nature innumerable, where hard labour and prudent forethought, tasking all the moral and physical energies of man, are needed to preserve life and make it endurable—suppose them to be able to bear and adapt themselves to this tremendous change, and how rapidly would their language grow in names and expressions for objects, processes, experiences, emotions, relations!

This is but a magnified example of what is always and everywhere going on in language: it expands and contracts in close adaptation to the circumstances and needs of those who use it; it is enriched and impoverished along with the enrichment or impoverishment of their minds. We have already pointed out that the lowest and least educated classes of English Speakers use not a tenth of the words which constitute to our apprehension the English tongue; the reduction, then, of the English people in its entirety to the condition of the classes referred to would imply the utter extinction of more than nine-tenths of its resources of expression: and all declension of civilization, decay of natural vigour, intermission of instruction, tends, in its way and measure, toward such a result; while, on the other hand, a race that is growing in knowledge and rising in character makes its tongue richer and nobler at every step of its upward career. But it is needless to insist farther upon a truth so obvious: no one will think of denying that the content of any language, in words and phrases and their meanings, must correspond with and be measured by the mental wealth of the community to whom it belongs, and must change as this changes. It is but the simplest corollary from the truth which we have already established, that men make their own language, and keep it in existence by their tradition, and that they make and transmit it for their own practical uses, and for no other end whatsoever.

A vastly more subtle and difficult question is, in what shall consist the linguistic growth which change of circumstance demands, or to which varying character and choice impel: how far shall it lie in the accession or withdrawal of words and meanings of words, and how far in development or decay of linguistic structure? It was pointed out in our first lecture that change of vocabulary, while it is the most legitimate and inevitable of any that a language undergoes, is also the least penetrating, touching most lightly the essential character of speech as the instrument of thought. And we saw later (p. 83) how such words as photograph and telegraph are brought in and naturalized, fitted with all the inflectional apparatus which the language possesses, without any further consequences. Such are mere additions to speech, which may affect the sum and aggregate value of its resources of expression, often to a considerable extent, without modifying its organism, or altering its grammatical form, its apprehension of relations and command of the means of signifying them. And yet, the same circumstances which lead to the great and rapid development of a vocabulary—especially where it takes place out of native resources, and in a less conscious and artificial way—may have an indirect effect upon grammatical development also; where so much change is going on, so much that is new coming into use, the influence will naturally be felt in some measure in every part of the language. Hints of such a possibility are discoverable even in the modern history of our own speech: graph, for example, has been brought in as the final member of so many new compounds that it almost presents itself to the consciousness of English speakers as a formative element, having a given office, and so constituting a part of the apparatus of English derivation; while ism, though of ultimate Greek origin, and coming to us through the French, has become a thoroughly English suffix, admitting of the most familiar and extended application in forming new words. So distinct, indeed, is our apprehension of the specific value of the ending ism that we are able to cut it off and make an independent word of it, talking of a person's isms, or of his favourite ism—as we also speak, less familiarly, of ana, 'personal reminiscence and anecdote,' or, in a half-humorous way, of the ologies, 'branches of learned study.'

We cannot, perhaps, better illustrate this subject of the modes of linguistic change as determined in their respective degree of operation by the influence of circumstances, than by briefly examining the way in which our own speech is now adapting itself to the growing needs of its speakers. The call upon it for increase of expressiveness during the past century and at the present time has been and is hardly less than would have been that upon the dialect of our imagined Polynesians in their new Icelandic home. Doubtless there was never before in the history of the world a time when men were accumulating with such rapidity knowledge of the past history and present constitution of the whole universe of created things—knowledge which is not, it is true, necessarily wisdom or virtue, but which can and ought to turn to both. A part, now, of this new knowledge—and a part of the highest importance to the general community—is such as calls for no change whatever in language, because it consists only in the better understanding of things long since observed and named. However much astronomy and physics may teach us respecting the sun and the planets, we continue to call them as of old; the words heat, cold, light, green, blue, red stand their ground in general use, notwithstanding the new vibratory theories, and the wonderful discoveries lately made in the spectrum of colours; pudding-stone is pudding-stone, and trap is trap, now as before the geologist had explained the origin of either; substances still fall to the earth and rise and float in the air, even after the discovery of gravitation; rubbed amber and the loadstone attract, as they did ere men had heard of electricity and magnetism as cosmical forces. There is, and evidently in the nature of the case can be, no limit to the extent to which a language may thus become impregnated with clearer knowledge and deeper meaning; and it has been already pointed out (p. 21) that the speech of different individuals at the same period may vary to almost any degree in the implication of these qualities, not less than the speech of the general community at different periods. But in great part, also, the modern additions to knowledge have been of such a sort as to demand the provision of a store of new signs: they have included an immense number of new particulars, things before unobserved or confounded with others under the same names, but which, being made the subject of distinct conceptions, have come to require specific appellations, that men might communicate with one another respecting them. Even this want has in some measure been filled without external change of the language, by the internal development of its resources, as illustrated in the preceding lecture, by the application of a not inconsiderable number of old words to new uses. Whenever any branch of knowledge, any art or science, either originates or is extended and perfected, the natural impulse is always to subserve its new uses with our old phraseology. The new classifications, substances, processes, products are not so unlike those already familiar to us that they may not be largely called by the same names, without fear of obscurity or error. Every technical vocabulary is thus made up to no small extent of the terms of common life, more precisely or more pregnantly used. The botanist talks of leaves and flowers; but in either term he includes some things that the common man would exclude, and the contrary. Current, conductor, induction, in the mouth of the electrician, mean things of which he who knows nothing of physics has no conception. Many a man who is aware that cohere means 'stick together' would be at a loss to distinguish cohesion from adhesion. Atom, base, acid, salt, affinity, reaction, are but instances of the words innumerable to which the chemist has given a new and special significance. In fact, the whole apparatus of common speech, as applied to the more definite and sharply distinguished uses of science, undergoes a kind of working-over and adaptation, which is of every degree, from such a conscious and artificial application as that of the word salt, used to express a large class of chemical compounds regarded as analogous with the substance formerly called by that name, down to such simple limitation or distincter apprehension of the true force of a term as is hardly separable from that change of implication without change of identity which we have illustrated above, by reference to the words sun, heat, rise and fall, etc. The mode of linguistic growth which we are now considering does, indeed, shade off into the former one, and is most nearly akin with it, in nature and in necessity. No language can possibly lose the capacity for it without losing its very life; in some languages, as we shall see hereafter, it is compelled to do the whole work of linguistic adaptation, external growth being a thing unknown.

In our own tongue, however, external growth, as represented by the formation of new derivatives, and new combinations of existing materials, is not altogether extinct, though reduced to a comparatively low grade of activity, and restricted in sphere. To its chief modes of action we have already, in other connections, had occasion to refer. It consists mainly in what we have called the mobilization of our words, the application to them of those formative elements which still remain to us with capacity of living use, and by which we produce both inflections and derivative words, as we have need of them. Increase of these our means of internal development is all but impracticable. Our most recent organically developed suffix is the adverbial ending ly, which has been found above so valuable in illustrating the general method of suffix-formation. Yet not a few elements of Latin origin have won by degrees the right to play an active part in the making of new English words: such are the prefixes en, dis, re, the suffixes ment, ess, able, ous, ic, ize, ism, fy, and others; nor, as we have seen, is the possibility even of farther additions to the list totally cut off. An instance of a rather artificial and abnormal extension of formative apparatus was afforded us by the introduction of the chemical terminology referred to in the last lecture (p. 122); the modern history of scientific nomenclature presents other similar cases; and the exigencies of common use, directed by the custom and authority of the learned, may yet cause some of these ingrafted elements to germinate and flourish as integral parts of the general system of speech. No such results are at all likely to follow from the combination and integration of elements of our own proper language which are now independent. Of composition, as a means of enrichment of our vocabulary, we make at present but a limited use: steamboat and railroad are familiar representatives of a class which, though not inconsiderable in numbers, forms a far less proportion of the modern growth in our tongue than in most others of its kindred.

Such of the needs of language-making as are not supplied by us in the methods already noticed are satisfied by the borrowing of words from other tongues; and this, as every one knows, is an expedient to which excessive resort is had in English. Our dictionaries have been filled up with thousands upon thousands of Greek and Latin words; and thousands more, too purely technical as yet to be admitted into the dictionaries, are current among certain classes of our community. The circumstances, external and internal, which give such prevalence among us to this mode of linguistic growth, are many and various. First among them, we may refer to the scantiness of our formative apparatus, and the indisposition to an extensive production of new compounds which characterizes our speech: these limitations to the capacity of internal development compel a recurrence to external wealth. Then, the combination into which our originally Germanic dialect was forced, by pressure of historical conditions, with the Romanic tongue of the conquering Normans, while it brought immediately into general use a host of terms of classical origin, opened the door for their indefinite multiplication, by creating analogies to which they could attach themselves, giving them such support in popular usage as took away the strangeness of aspect which they would else have had. Yet it is true that the words of common life, those which every English-speaking child learns first and continues to use oftenest, are overwhelmingly of Anglo-Saxon origin, are Germanic: Latin and Greek derivatives come in abundantly with culture, learning, special scientific training. And this explains in part the modern preponderance of such derivatives. The knowledge which they are introduced to represent is of a learned cast, not interesting in its details the general community of English speakers, nor accessible to them; belonging, rather, to a special class, which feels itself more closely united by bonds of community with like classes in other nations than with the mass of its own countrymen. There is a fellowship, a solidarity, among the chemists of Europe and America, for instance, which makes them name things on principles accepted among themselves, and out of languages known alike to them all, rather than out of the stores of expression, and in accordance with the usages, of their own vernaculars. It is doubtful whether any language that ever existed could have made provision healthily, from its own internal resources, for the expression of that infinite number of new particulars which modern science has been pouring in of late upon the general aggregate of knowledge. Think, for example, of the perplexity of the naturalist who returns from an exploring tour with a thousand new species of plants and animals, if he were compelled to devise vernacular designations for them all! And how useless the effort! They will remain for ever unknown to nineteen twentieths, perhaps, of those who speak his speech, and if one or another of them should ever become introduced to general knowledge, they would easily enough acquire familiar names. No modern language, then, whatever its superiority to the English in the capacity of internal growth, attempts to fill such departments of expression otherwise than by borrowing from the Latin and Greek, happy in the possession of stores so rich, so accessible, and so manageable, to draw upon. The names of animal and vegetable species, of their parts and specific differences, of mineral elements and compounds, of processes and relations, and so forth, are Latin or Latinic through the whole civilized world. If the German is more inclined to favour terms of native growth, and for hydrogen, oxygen, acid, says "water-substance" (wasserstoff), "sour-substance" (sauerstoff), "sourness," (säure), and the like, it may be seriously doubted whether the gain is of appreciable value. We have seen how little the act of association which binds together idea and sign is dependent upon the aid of etymological suggestiveness; and the forcing of a great variety of new specific meanings in a brief space of time upon the old material of a tongue may make quite as much for confusion as for intelligibility and vividness of expression. It is comparatively easy for a community to provide out of its vernacular resources of speech for that ordinary growth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom which comes in the main by the working over of conceptions already acquired and named, and only in lesser degree by the apprehension of new particulars; but we have only to rejoice that our language is by fortunate circumstances saved from a strain which the present conditions of our culture would otherwise have put upon it, and which is more severe than any living tongue has ever been obliged to endure.

But even things of the most common use and knowledge come to bear with us designations of learned and artificial make. A certain showy flower, introduced not very long ago by learned intervention to the parterres of the wealthy, but now found in every poor man'’s garden, and almost as familiar as the sun-flower or the rose, is known only by the name dahlia, given it by its botanical describer in honour of an earlier botanist, Dahl. The telegraph, a scientific device, keeps its foreign scientific title, not in our own country only, but all over the globe, although it has become an institution almost as universal and indispensable as the post. A substance over whose discovery and application no small part of our community has gone wild within the past few years, has not retained its honest English appellation of rock oil, or mineral oil, but has accepted from the learned the equivalent Latin name petroleum, and is so called by millions who have no knowledge whatever of the derivation and meaning of the term. The influence of the learned class in the process of English names-giving has been for many centuries a growing one, and has now become greatly predominant; and with it has grown, somewhat unduly, the introduction of classic word and phrase, to supplement, or even to replace, native English expression. There is a pedantically learned style which founds itself on the Latin dictionary rather than the English, and discourses in a manner half unintelligible except to the classically educated: but this is only the foolish exaggeration of a tendency which has become by degrees an integral part of English speech. To draw in like manner upon the resources of any other tongue (as, for instance, upon the German) would be a fault of a very different character—a pure impossibility, an intolerable affectation, because unsupported by anything in the previous usages of our mother-tongue.

We see, then, that the most obvious and striking peculiarity of English linguistic growth, the wholesale importation of foreign terms, is one by which it differs only in degree from other linguistic growth, ancient and modern, and that this degree of difference is explained by the circumstances of the case—the learned character of much of the knowledge demanding representation, the sluggishness of the native processes of word-formation, and the presence of numerous words of classic origin in our familiar speech; all which circumstances have begotten and fostered a habit of resorting more and more for the supply of new needs to the accessible and abundant stores of classical expression. The determining causes are wholly historical. The inaptness for internal development, the aptness to borrow, which distinguish our language from others of Germanic origin, are both mainly traceable to the Norman invasion. In consequence of that event, the Anglo-Saxon was for a time in danger of extinction, or of reduction to the rank of a vulgar patois. Political conditions, severing Anglo-Norman interests from those of the continent, and originating a common English feeling in the whole population, notwithstanding its diverse elements, led to a fusion of Norman-French and Saxon-English, instead of a displacement of the latter by the former: but, when the new tongue came forth, it was found shorn of much of its grammatical power, greatly altered in its forms and modes of construction. The purity and directness of linguistic tradition had been broken up; the conservative influence exercised upon the foundation-language by the cultivated class of its speakers had been for a time destroyed, and popular inaccuracies and corruptions allowed full sway; a mode of speech was learned by considerable masses of a population to whose fathers it was strange and barbarous; the rest had admitted to their daily and familiar use a host of new words on which their old apparatus of inflection sat strangely: and this was the result. So is it likely ever to be, when the intermingling on nearly equal terms of races of diverse speech issues in the elaboration, by mutual accommodation and compromise, of a new mixed dialect which all shall learn and use alike.

We must be careful not to mistake the nature of the obstacle which prevents the liberal increase of our vocabulary by means of combination of old materials. It is wholly subjective, consisting in our habits and preferences. There is hardly a compound formed in German, for example, which would not, if literally translated by an English compound, be understood, and which we might not therefore imitate, if intelligibility were all that we had to consult in our word-making. But we are obliged also to have m view-the prepossessions of the community; and this is not a thing which they are used to and will approve. The whole process of language-making and language-changing, in all its different departments, is composed of single acts, performed by individuals; yet each act is determined, not alone by the needs of the particular case, but also by the general usages of the community as acting in and represented by the individual; so that, in its initiation as well as its acceptance and ratification, it is virtually the act of the community, as truly conventional as if men held a meeting for its discussion and decision.

We have hitherto considered chiefly the effect of circumstances upon the growth of language, its enrichment with the means of designating new conceptions and representing new judgments. We have also briefly to examine their influence upon linguistic decay, upon phonetic change and grammatical corruption. These, as has been already sufficiently pointed out, are the result of the defective tradition of language; by carelessness in the acquisition of words, or by inaccuracy in their reproduction, men change from generation to generation the speech which they transmit. It is evident, then, that everything which assists the accuracy of linguistic tradition tends to preserve the phonetic and grammatical structure of language from alteration. Where speech is most unconsciously employed, with most exclusive attention to the needs and conveniences of the moment, with least regard to its inherited usages, there its changes are rifest. Any introduction of the element of reflection is conservative in its effect. A people that think of their speech, talk about it, observe and deduce its rules and usages, will alter it but slowly. A tendency to do this sometimes forms a part of a nation's peculiar character, being the result of qualities and circumstances which it is well-nigh or quite impossible to trace out and explain; but often it is called forth, or favoured and strengthened, by very obvious conditions; by admiring imitation of the ways and words of them of old time; by the possession of a traditional literature; but, most of all, by a recorded literature, the habit of writing, and a system of instruction. Culture and education are the most powerful of all the forces which oppose linguistic change. The smallest conceivable alterative influence will emanate from one who has been trained to speak correctly by a conscious effort, and who is accustomed to write what he says almost as frequently and naturally as he speaks it. Words, in their true form and independent entity, are too distinctly present to his mind for him to take part either in their fusion or mutilation. Hence the effect of literary culture is to fix a language in the condition in which it happens to be found, to assure to it the continued possession of the formative processes which are then active in its development, but to check or altogether prevent its acquisition of any others; to turn its prevailing habits into unalterable laws; and to maintain its phonetic character against anything but the most gradual and insidious change.

Thus far in the history of the world, this kind of conservative influence has usually been active only within the limits of a class; a learned or priestly caste has become the guardian of the national literature and the conservator of the tongue in which it was written; while to the masses of the people both have grown strange and unfamiliar. Deprived of the popular support, the cultivated dialect has at once begun to lose its vitality; for no language can remain alive which is not answering all the infinitely varied needs of a whole community, and adapting itself in every part to their changes; it is stinted of its natural and necessary growth when it is divorced from general use and made the exclusive property of a class. Thus there come to exist among the same people two separate tongues; the one an inheritance from the past, becoming ever more stiff and constrained, and employable only for special uses; the other the production of the present, growing constantly more unlike the other by the operation of the ordinary processes of linguistic change; full of inaccuracies and corruptions, if we choose to call them so, but also full of a healthy and vigorous life, which enables it finally to overthrow and replace the learned or sacred dialect of which it is the offspring. Such has been the origin and such the fate of all the learned dialects which, in various parts of the world, have been preserved as "dead languages," for the purposes of learned communication, after losing their character as the vernacular speech of a community: for instance, the ancient Egyptian, long kept up for sacred uses, and written in the hieroglyphic signs, after both language and letters had in popular use taken on another form; the Zend, in the keeping of the ministers of Zoroaster's doctrine; the Sanskrit, even yet taught in the Brahmanic schools of India, amid the Babel of modern dialects, its descendants; the Latin, the common language of the educated through all Europe, for centuries during which the later forms of Romanic speech, now the vehicles of a culture superior to that of Greece and Rome, were mere barbarous patois. Every dialect which is made the subject of literary culture is liable to the fate of the Latin; aristocracy and exclusiveness tend to final overthrow, in language as in politics; the needs and interests of the many are more important than those of the few, and must in the end prevail. True linguistic conservatism consists in establishing an educated and virtuous democracy, in enlisting the whole community, by means of a thorough and pervading education, in the proper and healthy preservation of the accepted usages of correct speech—and then in letting whatever change must and will come take its course. There is a purism which, while it seeks to maintain the integrity of language, in effect stifles its growth: to be too fearful of new words and phrases, new meanings, familiar and colloquial expressions, is little less fatal to the well-being of a spoken tongue than to rush into the opposite extreme.

It is hardly needful to point out that these desirable conditions are much more nearly realized in the case of our modern cultivated and literary languages than in those of olden time, and that the former have, in all human probability, a destiny before them very different from that of the latter. In the present constitution of society, among the enlightened nations of Europe and America, the forces conservative of the general purity of language have attained a development and energy to which only a distant approach was made under the most favourable circumstances in ancient times. The conscious and reflective users of speech, the instructed and cultivated, the writers of their thoughts, have become everywhere a class powerful in numbers as well as dominant in influence. Education, no longer confined to the upper layer, more or less pervades the whole mass of the people. Books are in every one's hands, assimilating and establishing the written and spoken usages of all. That form of the common speech in each country which has enlisted in its support the best minds, the sweetest and most sonorous tongues, is ever gaining ground upon the others, supplanting their usages, and promising to become and to continue the true popular language.

In America, the influences we have now been considering wear a somewhat peculiar form. On the one hand, the educated class nowhere else embraces so large a portion of the community, or has so vast a collective force; on the other hand, and partly for this very reason, the highest and best-educated class have less power here than in the less democratic countries of the Old World: the low-toned party newspaper is too much the type of the prevailing literary influence by which the style of speech of our rising generation is moulding. A tendency to slang, to colloquial inelegancies, and even vulgarities, is the besetting sin against which we, as Americans, have especially to guard and to struggle. To attain that thorough democracy which is the best life and vigour of language, to keep our English speech vivid with the thought and feeling of a whole people, we should not bring down the tone and style of the highest, nor average those of all classes; we should rather lift up the lower to the level of the higher.

Our review of the causes which determine the respective part played by the different processes of linguistic growth, and the rate at which they severally act, is far from being exhaustive. To treat the subject with thoroughness would require a treatise. Parts of it are of extreme subtlety and difficulty. Our attention has been directed almost solely to external historical circumstances, those of which the effect is most easily traced. We have but hinted here and there at the more recondite and most potent influences which are deep-seated in the individual character of different tongues and the qualities of the people who speak them. That complex and intricate combination of native capacities and dispositions, acquired and inherited habits, and guiding circumstances, of which, in each individual community, the form and development of the common speech is a product, is in no two communities the same, and everywhere requires a special and detailed study in order to its comprehension. Ethnologists are obliged, in the main, to take the differences of national character as ultimate facts, content with setting them clearly forth, not claiming to explain them; and a like necessity rests upon the linguist as regards linguistic differences: not only can he not account for the presence of peculiarities of character which determine peculiarities of speech, but even their analysis eludes his search; they manifest themselves only in these special effects, and are not otherwise demonstrable. To ascribe the differences of language and linguistic growth directly to "physical causes," to make them dependent on "peculiarities of organization," whether cerebral, laryngal, or other, is wholly meaningless and futile. Language is not a physical product, but a human institution, preserved, perpetuated, and changed, by free human action. Nothing but education and habit limits any man to the idiom in the possession of which he has grown up; within the community of speakers of the same tongue may readily be found persons with endowments as unlike, in degree and kind, as those which characterize the average men of distant and diverse races. Physical causes do, indeed, affect language, but only in two ways: first, as they change the circumstances to which men have to adapt their speech; and second, as they alter men's nature and disposition. Every physical cause requires to be transmuted into a motive or a mental tendency, before it can affect the signs by which we represent our mental acts. It is universally conceded that physical circumstances do produce a permanent effect upon the characteristics of race, internal as well as external, and so upon those, among the rest, which govern linguistic development; but in what measure, at what rate, and through what details of change, is as yet matter of the widest difference of opinion and the liveliest controversy. There are headlong materialists who pronounce man the slave and sport of nature, guided and controlled by the external forces amid which he exists, and who claim that his history may be explained and foretold by means of a knowledge of those forces; when as yet they have not found out even the A-B-C of the modes in which human nature is moulded by its surroundings. These men have their counterparts also among students of language. But, whatever may be hoped from the future, it is certain that at present nothing of value has been done toward showing how linguistic growth is affected in its kind and rate by physical causes. There is no human dialect which might not maintain itself essentially unaltered in structure, though carried to climes very unlike those in which it had grown up, and though employed by a people whose culture and mode of life was rapidly varying; emigration, often assumed to be the chief and most powerful cause of linguistic change, also often appears to exercise a conservative influence. And, on the other hand, a language may rapidly disintegrate, or undergo phonetic transformation, or vary the substance of its vocabulary, without moving from the region of its origin, or becoming the organ of other conditions of human life. When linguistic scholars can fully account for such facts as that the Icelandic is the most antique in form of the idioms of its family, that the Lithuanian has preserved more of the primitive apparatus of Indo-European inflection than any other known tongue of modern times, that the Armenian has become with difficulty recognizable as an Iranian dialect, that the Melanesian, African, and American languages are the most changeful of human forms of speech—then, perhaps, they may claim to comprehend the circumstances that regulate the growth of language.

The variation of language in space, its change from one region to another, is a not less obvious fact than its variation in time, its change from one epoch to another. The earth is filled with almost numberless dialects, differing from one another in a greater or less degree, and some of them, at least, we know by historical evidence to be descendants of a common original. This state of things finds its ready and simple explanation in the principles which have been already laid down; they will demand, therefore, but a brief application and further illustration.

We have been speaking, when treating of the growth of language, of vital processes, as going on in the body of speech itself, like the process of fermentation in bread, or of the displacement and replacement of tissues in an animal organism. But we have been careful, at the same time, to bear in mind that the word "process" was thus used only in a figurative sense. Every item of change which goes to make up the growth of human speech is ultimately a result of the conscious effort of human beings. In language, the atoms which compose the fermenting mass and the growing tissue are not inert matter, acted on by laws of combination and affinity, but intelligent creatures, themselves acting for a purpose. A process of linguistic growth, then, is only the collective effect, in a given direction, of the acts of a number of separate individuals, guided by the preferences, and controlled by the assent, of the community of which those individuals form a part. And upon the joint and reciprocal action on language of the individual and the community depend all the phenomena of dialectic separation and coalescence.

For, in the first place, it is evident that the infinite diversity of character and circumstance in the intelligent beings who have language in charge must tend to infinite diversity in their action and its products. Each independent mind, working unrestrainedly according to its own impulses, would impress upon the development of speech a somewhat different history. It was shown almost at the beginning of our discussions (p. 22) that no two men speak exactly the same tongue: of course, then, they would not propagate the same. Each has his own vocabulary, his own pet words and phrases, his own deviations from the normal standard of pronunciation, of construction, of grammar; the needs of each are in some degree unlike those of others; his mind is somewhat differently impressed and guided by feelings and experiences, differently swayed by the weight of existing analogies. Such tendency to variation is, to be sure, within comparatively narrow limits; individual speakers of English would not, if left to their own devices, rush madly off toward a Choctaw or Kamchatkan model of speech; yet its results are by no means imperceptible or insignificant; it is like the variation of the separate individuals of a species of plants or animals in respect to traits of structure and disposition, which, however slow its progress, would finally, if suffered to accumulate its effects, break up the species into well-marked varieties. Linguistic development is thus made up, as we may fairly express it, of an infinity of divergent or centrifugal forces.

But, in the second place, there is not wanting an effective centripetal force also, which holds all the others in check, which resolves them, giving value to that part of each which makes in a certain direction, and annulling the rest: this centripetal force is the necessity of communication. Man is no soliloquist: he does not talk for his own diversion and edification, but for converse with his fellows; and that would not be language which one individual alone should understand and be able to employ. Every one is, indeed, as we have already seen, engaged in his way and measure in modifying language; but no one's action affects the general speech, unless it is accepted by others, and ratified in their use, Every sign which I utter, I utter by a voluntary effort of my organs, over which my will has indefeasible control; I may alter the sign as I please, and to any extent, even to that of substituting for it some other wholly new sign; only, if by so doing I shock the sense of those about me, or make myself unintelligible to them, I defeat the very end for which I speak at all. This is the consideration which restrains me from arbitrariness and license in the modification of my speech, and which makes me exert my individual influence upon it only through and by the community of which I am a member. If those who form one community do not talk alike, and cannot understand one another, the fundamental and essential office of speech is not fulfilled. Hence, whatever changes a language may undergo, they must all be shared in by the whole community. The idiosyncrasies, the sharp angles and jutting corners, of every man's idiom must be worn off by attrition against those with which it comes in contact in the ordinary intercourse of life, that the common tongue may become a rounded unit. This does not imply an absolute identity of dialect, down to the smallest details, among all the constituent members of a community; within certain limits—which, though not strictly definable, are sufficiently distinct and coercive to answer their practical purpose perfectly well—each one may be as original as he pleases: he may push his oddity and obscurity to the very verge of the whimsical and the incomprehensible—or even beyond it, if he do not mind being misunderstood and laughed at; if his sense of his own individuality be so exaggerated that he is a whole community, a world, to himself. Nor must the word community, as used with reference to language, be taken in a too restricted or definite sense. It has various degrees of extension, and bounds within bounds: the same person may belong to more than one community, using in each a different idiom. For instance: I have, as we may suppose, a kind of home dialect, containing a certain proportion of baby-talk, and a larger of favourite colloquialisms, which would sound a little queerly, if they were not unintelligible, to any one outside of my family circle; as an artisan, pursuing a special branch of manufacture or trade, or as one engaged in a particular profession, or study, or department of art, I am a member of another community, speaking a language to some extent peculiar, and which would be understood neither by my wife and children nor by the majority of speakers of English. Thus, I may have dived deep into the mysteries of some scheme of transcendental philosophy, or searched and pondered the ultimate physical constitution of atoms; and, if I should discourse to a general audience of that which to me is full of profoundest significance and interest, while one out of twenty, perhaps, would follow me with admiring appreciation, to the other nineteen I should seem an incomprehensible ranter. But even as a general speaker of English, qualified to meet and converse intelligently with others who claim the same title, upon matters of import to us all, I may have my speech marked more or less strongly with local or personal peculiarities; it may exhibit unusual tones of utterance, or unusual turns of phrase, which, if I would be readily and thoroughly understood, I must endeavour to avoid. Now all these differences of speech, limited as their range may be, are in their essential nature dialectic; the distinction between such idioms, as we may properly style them, and well-marked dialects, or related but independent languages, is one, not of kind, but only of degree. For I also possess a considerable portion of my language in common with the Netherlander, the German, and the Swede, to say nothing of my remoter relations, the Russian, the Persian, and the Hindu; and if, in talking with any one of them, I could only manage to leave out of my conversation such words as belong to my dialect alone, and moreover, not to pronounce the rest with such a local peculiarity of tone, nor give them such special shades of meaning, he and I might get along together famously, each of us understanding all the other said. I can, indeed, make calculations and compose mathematical formulas with him all day long; or, if we are chemists, we can compare our views as to the constitution of all substances, organic and inorganic, to our mutual edification; since, as regards their mathematical and chemical language, their systems of notation and nomenclature, all who share European civilization form but a single community.

There is room, then, for all that diversity which was shown in our first lecture to belong to the speech of different individuals and different classes in the same community, along with that general correspondence which makes them speakers of the same language. The influence of community works in various degrees, and within various limits, according to the nature and extent of the community by which it is exercised. The whim of a child and the assent of its parents may make a change in the family idiom; the consent of all the artisans in a certain branch of mechanical labour is enough to give a new term the right to stand in their technical vocabulary; the majority of good writers and speakers of English is the only authority which can make a word good English in the part of our tongue that we all alike use and value; while all the learned of Europe must join together, in order to alter the notation of a number, or the symbol of a chemical element. But the principle is everywhere the same: as mutual intelligibility is the bond which makes the unity of a language, so the necessity of mutual intelligibility is the power which preserves and perpetuates that unity.

If communication is thus the assimilating force which averages and harmonizes the effects of discordant individual action on language, keeping it, notwithstanding its incessant changes, the same to all the members of the same community, then it is clear that everything which narrows communication, and tends to the isolation of communities, favours the separation of a language into dialects; while all that extends communication, and strengthens the ties which bind together the parts of a community, tends to preserve the homogeneity of speech. Suppose a race, occupying a certain tract of country, to possess a single tongue, which all understand and use alike: then, so long as the race is confined within narrow limits, however rapidly its language may yield to the irresistible forces which produce linguistic growth, all will learn from each, and each from all; and, from generation to generation, every man will understand his neighbour, whatever difficulty he might find in conversing with the spirit of his great-grandfather, or some yet remoter ancestor. But if the race grows in numbers, spreading itself over region after region, sending out colonies to distant lands, its uniformity of speech is exposed to serious danger, and can only be saved by specially favouring circumstances and conditions. And these conditions are yet more exclusively of an external character than those which, as we lately saw, determine the mode and rate of linguistic change in general: they consist mainly in the kind and degree of culture enjoyed and the effects which this naturally produces. In a low state of civilization, the maintenance of community over a wide extent of country is altogether impracticable; the tendency to segregation is paramount; local and clannish feeling prevails, stifling the growth of any wider and nobler sense of national unity and common interests; each little tribe or section is jealous of and dreads the rest; the struggle for existence arrays them in hostility against each other; or, at the best, the means of constant and thorough communication among individuals of the different parts of the country is wanting, along with the feelings which should impel to it. Thus all the diversifying tendencies are left to run their course unchecked; varieties of circumstance and experience, the subtler and more indirect influences of climate and mode of life, the yet more undefinable agencies which have their root in individual and national caprice, gradually accumulate their discordant effects about separate centres, and local varieties of speech arise, which grow into dialects, and these into distinct and, finally, widely dissimilar languages. The rate at which this separation will go on depends, of course, in no small degree, upon the general rate of change of the common speech; as the dialects can only become different by growing apart, a sluggishness of growth will keep them longer together—and that, not by its direct operation alone, but also by giving the weak forces of an imperfect and scanty communication opportunity to work more effectively in counteraction of the others. Thus all the influences which have already been referred to as restricting the variation of a language from generation to generation are, as such, equally effective in checking its variation from portion to portion of a people. But the most important of them also contribute to the same result in another way, by directly strengthening and extending the bonds of community. Culture and enlightenment give a wonderful cohesive force; they render possible a wide political unity, maintenance of the same institutions, government under the same laws; they facilitate community of memories and traditions, and foster national feeling; they create the wants and tastes which lead the people of different regions to mix with and aid one another, and they furnish the means of ready and frequent intercourse: all of which make powerfully for linguistic unity also. A traditional literature, sacred or heroic, tends effectively in the same direction. But of more account than all is a written literature, and an organized and pervading system of instruction, whereby the same expressions for thought, feeling, and experience are set as models before the eyes of all, and the most far-reaching and effective style of linguistic communication is established.

Moreover, that same necessity of mutual understanding which makes and preserves the identity of language throughout a community has power also to bring forth identity out of diversity. No necessary and indissoluble tie binds any human being to his own personal and local peculiarities of idiom, or even to his mother-tongue; habit and convenience alone make them his; he is ever ready to give them up for others, when circumstances make it worth his while to do so. The coarse and broad-mouthed rustic whom the force of inborn character and talent brings up to a position among cultivated men, wears off the rudeness of his native dialect, and learns to speak as correctly and elegantly, perhaps, as one who has been trained from his birth after the best models. Those who come up from among the dialects of every part of Britain to seek their fortune in the metropolis acquire some one of the forms of English speech which flourish there; and, even if they themselves are unable ever to rid themselves wholly of provincialisms, their children may grow up as thorough cockneys as if their families had never lived out of hearing of Bow bells. Any one of us who goes to a foreign land and settles there, identifying himself with a community of strange speech, learns to talk with them, as well as his previously formed habits will let him, and between his descendants and theirs there will be no difference of language, however unlike they may be in hue and feature. If adventurers of various race and tongue combine themselves together in a colony and take up their abode in some wild country, their speech at once begins to undergo a process of assimilation, which sooner or later makes it one and homogeneous: how rapidly this end shall be attained, and whether some one element shall absorb the rest, or whether all shall contribute equally to the resulting dialect, must be determined by the special circumstances of the case. Of the multitudes of Germans whom emigration brings to our shores, some establish themselves together in considerable numbers: they cover with their settlements a tract in the West, or fill a quarter in some of our large towns and cities. They form, then, a kind of community of their own, in the midst of the greater community which surrounds them, having numerous points of contact with the latter, but not absorbed into its structure: there are enough speakers of English among them to furnish all the means of communication with the world about them which they need; they are proud of their German nationality and cling to it; they have their own schools, paper, books, preachers—and their language, though sure to yield finally to the assimilating influences which surround it, may be kept up, possibly, for generations. So also with a crowd of Irish, clustered together in a village or suburb, breeding in and in, deriving their scanty instruction from special schools under priestly care: their characteristic brogue and other peculiarities of word and phrase may have an indefinite lease of life. But, on the other hand, families of foreign nationality scattered in less numbers among us can make no effective resistance to the force which tends to identify them thoroughly with the community of English speakers, and their language is soon given up for ours.

There is evidently no limit to the scale upon which such fusion and assimilation of speech may go on. The same causes which lead an individual, or family, or group of families, to learn and use another tongue than that which they themselves or their fathers have been accustomed to speak, may be by historical circumstances made operative throughout a whole class, or over a whole region. When two communities are combined into one, there comes to be but one language where before there were two. A multiplication and strengthening of the ties which bind together the different sections of one people tends directly toward the effacement of already existing varieties of dialect, and the production of linguistic uniformity.

Such effacement and assimilation of dialectic varieties, not less than dissimilation and the formation of new dialects, are all the time going on in human communities, according as conditions favour the one or the other class of effects; and a due consideration of both is necessary, if we would comprehend the history of any tongue, or family of tongues. Let us look at one or two examples, which shall serve to illustrate their joint and mutual workings, and to set forth more clearly the truth of the principles we have laid down.

We will consider first the history of that one among the prominent literary languages of the present day which has most recently attained its position, namely the German. From the earliest dawn of history, Germany has been filled with a multitude of more or less discordant dialects, each occupying its own limited territory, and no one of them better entitled than any other to set itself up as the norm of correct German speech. How far back their separation goes, it is impossible to tell; whence, when, and how the first Germanic tribe entered central Europe, that its tongue might become there the mother of so many languages, crowding Germany and Scandinavia, and spreading, through England, even to the shores and prairies of a new world; or whether the beginnings of dialectic division were made before the entrance of the race into its,present seats—these are secrets which will never be fully disclosed. There were sweeping changes in the range and character of the Germanic dialects during those ages of migration and strife when Germany and Rome were carrying on their life and death struggle. Whole branches of the German race, among them some of the most renowned and mighty, as the Goths and Vandals, wholly lost their existence as separate communities, being scattered and absorbed into other communities, and their languages also ceased to exist. Leagues and migrations, intestine struggles and foreign conquests, produced fusions and absorptions, extensions, contractions, and extinctions, in manifold variety; but without any tendency to a general unity: and three centuries and a half ago, when the modern German first put forth its claim to stand as the common language of Germany, there was in that country the same Babel of discordant speech as at the Christian era. Since the introduction of Christianity and the beginnings of civilization, more than one of the High-German dialects, as they are called, the dialects of central and southern Germany, had been for a season the subject of literary culture. This was the case with the idioms, in succession, of the Alemannic, Frankish, and Bavarian divisions of the race, between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries; then, for a time, the Swabian dialect gained the preëminence, and in it was produced a rich and noble legendary literature, containing precious memorials of national heroic story, and still studied and valued wherever the German tongue is spoken. Here was a promising beginning for a truly national language, but the conditions of the times were not yet such as to give the movement lasting and assured success. Three centuries later began the grand national upheaval of the Reformation. The writings of Luther, multiplied and armed with a hundred-fold force by the new art of printing, penetrated to all parts of the land, and to nearly all ranks and classes of the people, awakening everywhere a vivid enthusiasm. The language he used was not the local dialect of a district, but one which had already a better claim than any other to the character of a general German language: it was the court and official speech of the principal kingdoms of central and southern Germany, made up of Swabian, Austrian, and other dialectic elements.^[1] To a language so accredited, the internal impulse of the religious excitement and the political revolutions accompanying it, and the external influence of the press, which brought its literature, and especially Luther's translation of the Bible, into every reading family, were enough to give a common currency, a general value. It was set before the eyes of the whole nation as the most cultivated form of German speech; it was acknowledged and accepted as the dialect of highest rank, the only fitting organ of communication among the educated and refined. From that time to the present, its influence and power have gone on increasing. It is the vehicle of literature and instruction everywhere. Whatever may be the speech of the lower classes in any section, the educated, those who make up good society, speak the literary German; their children are trained in it; nothing else is written. The popular dialects are still as numerous as ever, because education is not pervading and thorough enough to extirpate them; and their existence may be prolonged for an indefinite period; but the literary language exercises a powerfully repressing and assimilating effect upon them all; it has lessened their rank and lowered their character, by withdrawing from them in great measure the countenance and aid of the cultivated; it has leavened them all with its material and its usages; and it may finally succeed in crowding them altogether out of use. Its sway extends just as far as the external influences which established it reach: it is not confined to the territory occupied by the High-German dialects, its nearest kindred; the people of the northern provinces also, speaking tongues of Low-German descent, which are much more nearly related with the Netherlandish, or even with the English, are drawn by the ties of political, social, and religious community with the rest of Germany to accept and use it. While, on the other hand, political independence, aided by diversity of social and religious usages, has given a separate existence as a literary language to the Dutch or Netherlandish, and yet more notably to the English, descendants of dialects originally undistinguished among the crowd of Low-German idioms which lined the shores of the North Sea.

The history of most other literary languages is of the same character with that which we have just been examining. Each was, at the outset, one out of a number of kindred but more or less diverse forms of speech, and the predominance which it came to gain over them was the result, not of its inherent merits as an instrument of thought and means of communication, but of outward circumstances, which made its usages worth the acquisition of a wider and wider community. Thus the parent language of the modern French was the vernacular speech of only a small part of the population of France; and it long had a rival, and almost a superior, in the early and highly cultivated dialect of southern France, the Provençal, or langue d'oc; nor, if the kingdom of Toulouse had maintained itself, would the latter ever have yielded to the former: but the sceptre of political supremacy over all France passed into the keeping of the northern provinces, and their speech became the rule of good usage throughout the land, while the langue d'oc lost by degrees its character as a cultivated dialect, and survives only in rude and insignificant provincial patois. The Italian was, in like manner, the popular idiom only of Tuscany, one of the innumerable local dialects which crowd and jostle one another between the Alps and Sicily, and its currency among the educated classes of the whole peninsula is the effect of literary influence and of instruction.

An illustration of a somewhat different character is afforded us by the history of the Latin, a history in many respects more remarkable than that of any other language which has ever existed. This conquering tongue—whose descendants now occupy so large and fair a part of Europe, and, along with their half-sister, the English, fill nearly all the New World, and numerous scattered tracts, coasts, and islands, on every continent and in every ocean, while its material has leavened and enriched the speech of all enlightened nations—was the vernacular idiom, not twenty-five centuries ago, of a little isolated district in middle Italy, a region which, on any map of the world not drawn upon a scale truly gigantic, one might easily cover with the end of a finger. How and when it came there, we know not; but it was one of a group of related dialects, descendants and joint representatives of an older tongue, spoken by the first immigrants, which had grown apart by the effect of the usual dissimilating processes. Remains of at least two of these sister dialects, the Oscan and the Umbrian, are still left in existence, to exercise the ingenuity of the learned, and to illustrate the ante-historic period of Italic speech. The Latin was pressed on the north by the Etruscan, and threatened from the south by the Greek, languages of much more powerful races, and the latter of them possessing a higher intrinsic character, and an infinitely superior cultivation: no one could then have dared to guess that its after career would be so much more conspicuous than theirs. Its spread began with the extension of Roman dominion, and was the plainest and most unequivocal sign of the thorough and penetrating nature of that dominion. Not content with the loose and nominal sway which the Persian sovereign exercised over the heterogeneous parts of his vast empire, or the yet laxer authority of the modern Mongol rulers over their wider conquests, the Romans infused, as it were, a new organic life into the vast body corporate of which they were the head, and made their influence felt through its every nerve and fibre. Italy they first subjected and Romanized. The yoke they imposed, and riveted by their military colonies, their laws and institutions, their culture, and their all-penetrating administration, was a bond of community against which no other proved able to maintain itself; all the languages of the peninsula, from the Gaulish of the north to the Greek of the extreme south, gave way by degrees before the tongue of the conquering city, and Italy became a country of one uniform speech. And yet not wholly uniform: relics of the ancient languages maintained themselves for a long time in certain more inaccessible districts, and their influence was doubtless to be distinctly seen in the varying local dialects of the different parts of the peninsula—as, indeed, traces of it are even now discoverable there. The common speech of Italy, too, setting aside these dialectic distinctions, was not the pure polished Latin of Cicero and Virgil, but a ruder idiom, containing already the germs of many of the changes exhibited by the modern Italian and the other Romanic tongues. The same process of conquest and incorporation into the Roman community was carried farther, upon a grand and surprising scale, into the other countries of Europe. The Celts of Gaul, the Celts and Iberians of Spain, gave up their own languages and adopted that of their rulers and civilizers, not less completely than have the Celts of Ireland, within the last few centuries, exchanged their Irish speech for English: of Celtic words ‘ and usages only scanty and unimportant traces are to be found in the modern French and Spanish. The same fate threatened Germany, had not her brave and hardy tribes offered too stubborn a resistance to the already waning forces of the empire; and Britain also, had not its remote situation and inferior value as a province caused the Roman hold upon it to be weak, and soon abandoned. Less considerable tracts of south-eastern Europe, stretching from the northern border of Italy to near the mouth of the Danube, yielded to the same influence: subdued by the arms, colonized from the population, organized by the policy, civilized by the culture, of the great city, they learned also to talk her language, forgetting their own. Thus arose the great and important group of the Romanic languages, as they are called; namely, the Italian, the French, the Spanish and Portuguese, the Rhæto-Romanic of southern Switzerland, and the Wallachian—each including a host of varying dialects, all lineal descendants of the Latin, all spoken by populations only in small part of Latin race.

We must not suppose, however, that a pure and classical Latin was ever the popular dialect of this wide-extended region of Europe, any more than of Italy after its first Romanization. The same counteracting causes, acting on a grander scale and with an intensified force, prevented correctness and homogeneity of speech. The populace got their Latin rather from the army and its followers, the colonists and low officials, than from educated Romans and the works of great authors. Doubtless there was not at first such a difference between the dialect of the highest and of the lowest that they could not understand one another. But, whatever it was, it rapidly became wider: while study and the imitation of unchanging models kept the scholars and ecclesiastics in possession of the classical Latin, only a little barbarized by the irresistible intrusion into it of words and constructions borrowed from vernacular use, the language of the masses grew rapidly away from it, breaking up at the same time into those innumerable local forms to whose existence we have already referred. There was no conserving and assimilating influence at work among the millions who had taken for their own the language of Rome, capable either of binding them fast to its established usages or of keeping their lines of linguistic growth parallel. Special disturbing forces came in here and there. Incursions and conquests of German tribes brought an element of Germanic speech into the tongues alike of Spain, France, and Italy. Centuries of Saracen domination engrafted upon the Spanish language a notable store of words of Arabic derivation. When, at length, the dark ages of European history were over, and knowledge and culture were to be taken out of the exclusive custody of the few, and made the wealth and blessing of the many, the Latin was a dead language, much too far removed from popular wants and sympathies to be able to serve the needs of the new nations. Hence the rise in each separate country, at not far from the same time, of a new national tongue, to be the instrument and expression of the national culture. All Romanized Europe was in the condition already described as that of Germany prior to the advancement of the modern German to its present position; a chaos of varying dialects was there; and, in every case, external historical circumstances determined which of them should attain a higher value, and should subject and absorb the rest.

In all this alternate and repeated divergence and convergence of dialects there is evidently nothing which needs to be looked upon as mysterious, or even puzzling. Such has been the history of language from the beginning, and in all parts of the earth. We need only the tendency of individual language to vary, and the effect of community to check, limit, and even reverse this tendency, in order to explain every case that arises: the peculiar conditions of each case must decide whether their joint action shall, on the whole, make for homogeneity or for diversity of speech; and the result, in kind and in degree, will vary according to the sum of the causes which produced it; as the resultant motion, in rate and direction, combines and represents all the forces, however various and conflicting, of whose united action it is the effect.

Thus, as has been already pointed out, when there takes place a fusion of two communities, larger or smaller, of varying speech, no general law can determine what shall be the resulting dialect. When the Romans conquered Gaul, although forming only a minority of the population, they almost totally obliterated the Gaulish speech, putting the Latin in its place, for they brought with them culture and polity, art and science, learning and letters: they made it better worth while for the Celts to learn Latin than to adhere to their own ancient idiom. When, however, the Germanic Franks, a few centuries later, conquered in their turn the now Latinized Gaul, and turned it into a kingdom of France, they adopted the language of their more numerous and more cultivated subjects, only adding a small percentage of Germanic words to its vocabulary, and perhaps contributing an appreciable influence toward hastening the decay, already well in progress, of the Latin grammatical system. The same thing happened once more, when the Scandinavian Northmen, representing another branch of the Germanic family, after extorting from the beaten and trembling monarchs of France the cession of one of her fairest provinces, became the not less formidable and dreaded Normans. Although placed in seemingly favourable circumstances for conserving their linguistic independence, crowded together as they were within comparatively narrow bounds, and making on their own ground, of which they were absolute masters, the majority of the population, they yet could not resist the powerful assimilating influences which pressed them, a horde of uncouth and unlearned barbarians, on every side. Within a wonderfully short time, their Norse tongue had altogether gone out of use, leaving traces only in a few geographical names: along with French manners, French learning, and French polity, they had implicitly adopted also French speech. Hardly was this conversion accomplished, when they set forth to propagate their new linguistic faith in a country occupied by dialects akin with that which they had recently forsworn. The Angles and Saxons, Germanic tribes, had meantime finished the task, only begun by the Romans, of extirpating upon the largest and best part of British ground the old Celtic speech. They had done it in a somewhat different way, by sheer brute force, by destroying, enslaving, or driving out the native population, and filling all but the most inaccessible regions of the island with their own ferocious tribesmen. Hence the wholly insignificant remains of Celtic material to be found among the ordinary stores of expression of our English tongue. Christianity and civilization found the invaders in their new home, and an Anglo-Saxon literature grew up, which, had circumstances continued favourable, might have aided national unity of government, institutions, and culture to assimilate the varying dialects of the country, producing a national language not inferior in wealth and polish to our present speech. But they who take the sword shall perish by the sword: upon the Anglo-Saxons were wreaked the woes they had themselves earlier brought upon the Celts. Danish and Norse invasions, during a long period, bitterly vexed and weakened the Saxon state, and it finally sank irrecoverably under the Norman conquest. This time, the collision of two diverse languages, upborne by a nearly equal civilization—the partial superiority of that of the Normans being more than counterbalanced by their inferiority in numbers—under the government of political circumstances already explained, produced a result different from any which we have thus far had occasion to notice—namely, a truly composite language, drawing its material and its strength in so nearly equal part from the two sources that scholars are able to dispute whether the modern English is more Saxon or more French. Into the details of the combination we cannot now stay to enter, but must pass on to note the later dialectic history of the language, merely directing attention to the important and familiarly known fact that its formative apparatus—whether consisting in inflections, affixes of derivation, or connectives and relational words—along with the most common and indispensable part of its vocabulary, remained almost purely Saxon, so that it is to be accounted still a Germanic dialect in structure, although furnished with stores of expression in no small part of Romanic origin.

The fusion of Saxon and Norman elements in English speech did not reach in equal measure all parts of the land or all classes of the people, nor did it by any means wipe out previously existing dialectic differences, thus furnishing a new and strictly homogeneous speech as a starting-point whence a new process of dialectic divergence should commence. On the contrary, Britain is still, like Germany, only in a less degree, a country full of dialects, some of whose peculiarities go back to the diversities of speech among the tribes by whom the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the island was achieved, thirteen hundred years ago, while the rest are of every date of origin, from that remote period to the present. One or two of these dialects—especially the Scottish and the Yorkshire—poetry and fiction have made somewhat familiarly known to us; others are matters of keen and curious interest to the student of language, their testimony being hardly less essential than that of the literary dialect to his comprehension of the history of English speech.

But it was impossible that, in the transfer of English to the continent of America, these local dialects should maintain themselves intact; that could only have been the result of a separate migration of parts of the local communities to which they belonged, and of the continued maintenance of their distinct identity in their new place of settlement. Such was not the character of the movement which filled this country with an English-speaking population. Old lines of local division were effaced; new ties of community were formed, embracing men of various province and rank. It was not more inevitable that the languages of the various nationalities which have contributed to our later population should disappear, swallowed up in the predominant English, than that the varying forms of English should disappear, being assimilated to that one among them which was better supported than the rest. Nor could it be doubtful which was the predominant element, to which the others would have to conform themselves. In any cultivated and lettered community, the cultivated speech, the language of letters, is the central point toward which all the rest gravitate, as they are broken up and lose their local hold. And our first settlers were in no small part from the instructed class, men of high character, capacity, and culture. They brought with them a written language and a rich literature; they read and wrote; they established schools of every grade, and took care that each rising generation should not fall behind its predecessor in learning. The basis, too, of equality of rights and privileges on which they founded their society added a powerful influence in favour of equality of speech. As a natural and unavoidable consequence, then, of these determining conditions, and not by reason of any virtue for which we are to take credit to ourselves, the general language of America, through all sections of the country and all orders of the population, became far more nearly homogeneous, and accordant with the correct standard of English speech, than is the average language of England. And the same influences which made it so have tended to keep it so: the democratic character of our institutions, and the almost universality of instruction among us, have done much to maintain throughout our community an approximate uniformity of idiom. There was doubtless never a country before, where, down to the very humblest classes of the people, so many learned to read and spell out of the same school-books, heard the same speakers, from platform, desk, and pulpit, and read the same books and papers; where there was such a surging to and fro of the population, such a mixture and intimate intercourse of all ranks and of all regions. In short, every form of communication is more active and more far-reaching with us than ever elsewhere; every assimilating influence has had unequalled freedom and range of action. Hence, there was also never a case in which so nearly the same language was spoken throughout the whole mass of so vast a population as is the English now in America. Modern civilization, with the great states it creates, and the wide and active intercourse among men to which it prompts and for which it affords the needed facilities, is able to establish upon unoccupied soil, and then to maintain there, community upon a scale of grandeur to which ancient times could afford no parallel.

Nor have we failed to keep nearly even pace with our British relations in the slow progressive development of the common tongue: our close connection with the mother-country, the community of culture which we have kept up with her, our acknowledgment of her superior authority in matters of learning and literature, have been able thus far to restrain our respective lines of linguistic growth from notable divergence. Though we are sundered by an ocean, there have been invisible ties enough between us to bind us together into one community. Yet our concordance of speech is not perfect: British purism finds fault with even our higher styles of discourse, oral and written, as disfigured by Americanisms, and in both the tone and the material of colloquial talk the differences are, of. course, much more marked. We have preserved some older words, phrases, and meanings which their modern use discards; we have failed as yet to adopt certain others which have sprung up among them since the separation; we have originated yet others which they have not accepted and ratified. Upon all these points we are, in the abstract, precisely as much in the right as they; but the practical question is, which of the two is the higher authority, whose approved usage shall be the norm of correct English speaking. We have been content hitherto to accept the inferior position, but it is not likely that we shall always continue so. Our increasing numbers and our growing independence of character and culture will give us in our own estimation an equal right, at the least, and we shall feel more and more unwilling to yield implicitly to British precedent; so that the time may perhaps come when the English language in America and the English language in Britain will exhibit a noteworthy difference of material, form, and usage. What we have to rely upon to counteract this separating tendency and annul its effect is the predominating influence of the class of highest cultivation, as exerted especially through the medium of literature. Literature is the most dignified, the most legitimate, and the most powerful of the forces which effect the conservation of language, and the one which acts most purely according to its true merit, free from the adventitious aids and drawbacks of place and time. It is through her literature that America has begun, and must go on, to win her right to share in the elaboration of the English speech. Love and admiration of the same master-works in poetry, oratory, philosophy, and science has hitherto made one community of the two great divisions of speakers of English, and ought to continue to unite them—and it will, we hope, do so: but more or less completely, according as that portion of the community which is most directly reached and effectively guided by literature is allowed authority over the rest.

We are, however, by no means free from dialects among our own population, although we may hope that they will long, or always, continue to be restricted within narrow limits of variation from the standard of correct speech, as they are at present. The New Englander, the Westerner, the Southerner, even of the educated class, betrays his birth to a skilled observer by the peculiarities of his language; and the lower we descend in the social scale, the more marked and prominent do these peculiarities become. There is hardly a locality in the land, of greater or less extent, which has not some local usages, of phrase or utterance, characterizing those whose provincialism has not been rubbed off by instruction or by intercourse with a wider public. There is a certain degree of difference, too, of which we are all conscious, between the written and the colloquial style: there are words and phrases in good conversational use, which would be called inelegant, and almost low, if met with in books; there are words and phrases which we employ in composition, but which would seem forced and stilted if applied in the ordinary dealings of life. This is far from being a difference sufficient to mark the literary English as another dialect than that of the people; yet it is the beginning of such a difference; it needs no change in kind, but only a change in degree, to make it accord with the distinction between any literary language which history offers to our knowledge and the less cultivated dialects which have grown up in popular usage by its side, and by which it has been finally overthrown and supplanted.

Nothing, then, as we see, can absolutely repress dialectic growth; even the influences most powerfully conservative of identity of language, working in the most effective manner which human conditions have been found to admit, can only succeed in indefinitely reducing its rate of progress.

It will be noticed that we have used the terms "dialect" and "language" indifferently and interchangeably, in speaking of any given tongue; and it will also have been made plain, I trust, by the foregoing exposition how vain would be the attempt to establish a definite and essential distinction between them, or give precision to any of the other names which indicate the different degrees of diversity among related tongues. No form of speech, living or dead, of which we have any knowledge, was not or is not a dialect, in the sense of being the idiom of a limited community, among other communities of kindred but somewhat discordant idiom; none is not truly a language, in the sense that it is the means of mutual intercourse of a distinct portion of mankind, adapted to their capacity and supplying their needs. The whole history of spoken language, in all climes and all ages, is a series of varying and successive phases; external circumstances, often accidental, give to some of these phases a prominence and importance, a currency and permanence, to which others do not attain; and according to their degree of importance we style them idiom, or patois, or dialect, or language. To a very limited extent, natural history feels the same difficulty in establishing the distinction between a "variety" and a "species:" and the difficulty would be not less pervading and insurmountable in natural than in linguistic science, if, as is the case in language, not only the species, but even the genera and higher groups of animals and plants were traceably descended from one another or from common ancestors, and passed into each other by insensible gradations. Transmutation of species in the kingdom of speech is no hypothesis, but a patent fact, one of the fundamental and determining principles of linguistic study.

Notes

1. See Schleicher, Deutsche Sprache, p. 107 seq.