ENGLISH AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE.
BY PRESIDENT D. H. WHEELER, D.D., LL.D.
At the beginning of this study we must determine as clearly as possible the meaning attached to the word universal when it is applied to a language. For this purpose, the word is employed in a restricted sense. It is not meant that men are returning to the conditions of speech which prevailed before the building of Babel. To that condition men may or may not return in some far off century; so far as we can judge, that reunion of mankind is very distant. Max Müller[1] says that 900 languages are spoken by the human race; and if dialects are added the number may be three or four times as large. Most of our race speak dialects having no literature, and it is found to be a very slow task to substitute the language of a nation for the dialects of its people. Classical Greek was probably spoken by only a few of the Greeks. We know that the Latin of Cicero was not, not even in Rome, the speech of the people. At this day more than a score of dialects are spoken in Italy, and the majority of the population of that Peninsula can neither speak nor understand Italian. Public education and other unifying influences make very little progress against the diversity of speech in the various provinces. An Italian gentleman is bred in a nurse’s language (the dialect) and educated in Italian. He speaks two tongues, dialect and Italian; his servants speak but one, and that is the dialect. To break up the power of the nurse, and of the local influences which she represents, is a Herculean task which must be accomplished in every country except the United States, the Canadas, and a part of Great Britain, before mankind will speak only 900 tongues; the time required to reduce nine hundred to one can only be guessed at. If the problem of a universal language were how to provide a common language to be exclusively used by all men, this problem would be one for pure speculation, in the solving of which the imagination would be more active than the reason.
There is another sense in which scholars speak of a universal language. (1) There has always been in our Aryan[2] tribe a leading literary language. Once it was Sanskrit;[3] perhaps at a later time it was Persian; later it was Greek; later it was Latin. This Aryan tribe of ours has made the greater part of the history of the last 3,000 years; to-day it is the history-making and literature-making tribe. Great tracts of older history—Babylonian, Arabian, Egyptian—lie outside of the Aryan movements; but Persian, Greek, Roman, German, French, Spanish, English and American history lie in the Aryan line. Now, then, within this line some one Aryan language has always enjoyed a literary predominance. (2) For other than literary purposes, some one of our family of languages has at one time or another had an extended currency. For something like two centuries French, for example, has been the language of diplomacy. We are probably passing out of a period which has lasted for half a century, of the predominance of German as a language of research, especially of metaphysical and grammatical study. These examples will suffice to show what is meant by our problem. In trade and practical invention English is, in this modified sense, a universal language. What I undertake to measure is this: the probability that, at a not distant time, English will be universal in more senses (used by people of many countries for more purposes) than any other Aryan language was ever before used. Some careful observers believe that this is the present position of the language—that it is now universal to an extent quite beyond all precedent. I think that as a literary, political and commercial language, English has a fair prospect of universal use within the Aryan tribe, and a better prospect than any other tongue of coming into use for these purposes all over the globe.
1. The mere arraying of numbers carries with it a kind of presumption in favor of English. Did 5,000,000 ever at one time use either classic Greek or the Hellenic form of that speech? I seriously doubt that at any time 5,000,000 of people could have understood each other in any one form of that tongue. Did ever at any one time 15,000,000 of people speak the Latin of our classic authors? I doubt it. Turn to English, and we find not less than 110,000,000 of people speaking it at the present time. And this comparison is made much stronger when we remember that, one hundred years ago, our number did not probably exceed fifteen millions. Our vast growth is related to forces and conditions still existing, and now giving us an accelerating progress in numbers. I shall return to these forces and conditions in a later paragraph. Looking at our competitors, we see that the Germans come next to us, with probably not more than 45,000,000. The German empire counts 45,000,000, and there are 5,000,000, perhaps, of Austrian Germans; but the empire envelops millions of non-Germans. They sometimes zealously claim the Low Dutch; but we could claim them for English with better right. Next come the French with 37,000,000, about one third only of our strength. I think it fair for these purposes to count the populations under the dominion of the several tongues. French, English and German are spoken all over the world. Among the three runs the competition for the first place in the Aryan tribe. I do not commit the folly of making race lines and speech lines the same; but it is a convenient mode of describing the field of this competition as that of the Aryan race, although there have been so many fusions of tribes that perhaps there is no Aryan race at this late day.
2. Another presumption in favor of our language arises from the history of the competition for the first place which has gone on since the rise of the modern European nations. After the Dark Ages,[4] Italian first came to prominence as a polished literary tongue. Its poets converted a dialect into a language, and from Italian literature our Chaucer, our Shakspere, and even our Milton drew inspiration as well as materials for English poetry. As a literary language, Italian was for two centuries a universal language. Spain had the next opportunity for the primacy. Her flag was first planted on the outposts of this continent; the conquests of her kings at one moment placed Europe and America in her hands. Her poets and philosophers made her language as honorable in literature as her sailors and soldiers made it in discovery and conquest. If Spain had retained her grasp on the Mississippi valley and on Mexico and South America, she, and not we, would now be supreme on this continent; and Spanish, not English, would be the dominant speech of North America. But Spain may be said to have retired voluntarily from the primacy of the Aryan tribe; a great language and a great literature descended to generations of Spaniards who had ceased to be great. Next, the French language took the lead. During the eighteenth century the language of France was undoubtedly the leading Aryan tongue. Since the beginning of this century German has come strongly into the competition, and English has gradually attained a preponderance in numbers over our two great competitors.
3. A third presumption in our favor arises from the diversity of great functions which English fills. It is a political, a literary, a common, and a commercial speech. In this brief space I can dwell only on the fact that it is, in a peculiar sense, a political language. The English race has led the way towards modern liberty and towards the political institutions and habits which are the safeguards of freedom. English words even are in use among the continental nations to describe political things which they have borrowed from us. The word meeting is a good example. But the mere diffusion of political terms means comparatively little. The only really great universal language of the past was the language of Rome, and its preëminence grew from its political character. There are in modern Europe two sets of political ideas and juridical institutions; one is Roman, and the other is English; and the two face each other in the modern world, and are really in silent but effective competition with each other. Outside of England, Europe is Roman except as it has been made English. The continental nations have parliaments which are pale copies of the vigorous legislative bodies which cover the English-speaking world. Rome is mighty yet, for the juridical systems of the continent of Europe have their foundations in the Roman civil law. The greatness of Latin did not arise from the genius of the Roman poets and orators. It laid its vigorous hand on human society, and in some sort it is still administering civil society. English has a political and a judicial system of its own, and these systems are conquering mankind. The adoption of the parliament and the trial by jury by continental nations prove the high value of the English inventions in government and law. The French and the German are neither of them political languages. French is the language of a nation which will long command the respect of mankind; but its language counts for nothing in its political structure. German is the language of a great people who make good citizens, but have until recently shown little capacity for political affairs, and have yet to make a great national record. The genius of Bismarck has created a great empire out of a great people; but it remains to be seen whether any aggressive political ideas are to be born of this German empire. The English political system is aggressive. Englishmen are nation-builders; a shipload of them cast upon a desert island would form a government as instinctively and as easily as they would build themselves houses. In this respect English is like Latin; it is the language of a distinct, original political system, whose obvious advantages are enticing men to copy it all over the world.
4. Another presumption in favor of our speech arises from certain peculiarities of its grammar and of its enunciation. In its grammar, it has cast off more of the inflexional burdens than either of its competitors. Both of them retain the fictitious distinction of genders by terminations, and they are in other respects weighted with inflexional incumbrances. English has, unfortunately, a small inheritance of strong nouns and verbs; but it is far simpler in its grammar than either French or German. And it is not by any means a small matter that the grammarian has never obtained the control of the language. In this respect the Germans enjoy more freedom than the French; but in neither language is the grammarian so little powerful as he is among us. The reason is that English is spoken for all purposes by all our people. I do not forget the English dialects as an exception; but they are a very small exception in contrast with the fact that neither literary French nor literary German are used by the mass of either people for all purposes. There is “bad German” for daily life, and there is dialect French for the mass of Frenchmen outside of the great towns. In our language many efforts have been made to fix precise rules which would please the grammarian and render good English difficult, and therefore not common. These efforts have not prevented the progress of English toward simplicity, and the vigor which simplicity imparts; and the result is that children and foreigners readily learn and use the language which is employed in our books and periodicals. By flouting the grammarian we have dethroned the nurse, and have not one language for the home and another for the book.
The enunciation of English is characterized by a simplicity which has not been enjoyed by any other great language. The English word has but one vocal qualification, and that is the accent on a single syllable. And such is the simplicity of this accent that it may be heavy or light, and still the word is intelligible. The vowels all tend to a nearly common form in most situations; and if the accent be in the right place the word is usually understood. There are, of course, many exceptions, such as an Italian a at the end of many words; but though one says feyther, faather, or fauther, we still know what he means. The force of this consideration will best appear by contrast. We do not know how classic Greek was enunciated; but we have reason to suppose that the vocalization was as elaborate and artificial as the music of light opera. It was, of course, easily spoken after one had learned it, but the learning of it must have been a great task for a foreigner. Latin was less elaborately artificial, but there was doubtless an intonation of the Latin sentence, and a marking of the varying lengths of vowels; and these features must have made good Latin difficult and rare. We know that Italian spreads slowly throughout Italy under a system of public instruction, and that it defies the foreigner’s industry and patience, on account of the demand it makes for well defined vowels and a certain sentence rhythm. French is hardly less, if at all less difficult, because it makes similar demands upon the attention and vocal skill of the speaker. A good illustration of all this is found in the fact that the English ear is pleased, while the French and Italian ears are displeased by a “brogue,” or a variation of the position of a word in a sentence. We all like to hear foreigners speak our tongue, precisely because they set it to a new music and show us the range of its grammatical simplicity. There is doubtless a best arrangement of the words in any English sentence. If the grammarians had had their way, this best arrangement would have become the only proper arrangement. The fact that we allow the foreigner to put our words into a different order than the best, or even the second best—and are still pleased with his work—shows, I think, that English has in its vocal and syntactical systems a simplicity and a flexibility which adapt it to universal use.
5. There is also a presumption in favor of English which arises from its history and from certain results of that history. It was originally Teutonic, and made its first alliance with Scandinavian, and so by swallowing up the speech of “the Danes” it came to represent the northern branch of the Aryan race with more breadth than High German shows. Then came the Norman Conquest, by which other “Danes” who had conquered Normandy and adopted the French language became the masters of England. The contest between French and English ended as that between Scandinavian and English had ended—English swallowed French. This event gave us our composite English, and gave the world a language in which the northern and southern streams of Aryan speech mingle their waters and collect their far-gathered wealth. Ours is a composite and compromise speech. In the Danish and Norman struggles, our tongue proved its tenacity, its “holdfast.” In each struggle the conqueror adopted the dialect of the conquered. But in these conflicts, English showed itself to be not only stubbornly vital, but also remarkably charitable and catholic. It remained English, but it gave liberal hospitality to Danish and French words. And ever since, it has been a great borrower of foreign words. It is in this respect utterly unlike French, which will hardly tolerate even a foreign name, but translates these names whenever it is possible. I have sometimes wondered whether our speech might not become a world-speech by mere swallowing of the vocabularies of other languages. It is, of course, not a subject for rational conjecture; but neither would that great feast of French words have been a rational forecast in the eleventh century. We have borrowed from all the great tongues of our tribe, and from many other great and small dialects. We have always been borrowing; we borrow every year. It would be an entertaining and not unprofitable task to collect these harvests of the last fifty years. The readiness with which we naturalize a foreign word has made many a grammarian sick of his profession; but borrowing words is an English propensity which nothing can “reform” out of us. And this catholicity looks in several ways toward universality. Neither of our competitors has any corresponding merit. French is a grand speech, but it will not tolerate foreign words. German is a grand speech; but it is German, and nothing else, except as it has been infiltrated with literary and judicial Latin. I must pass hurriedly over some other important presumptions in our favor.
6. The primacy in commerce is freely conceded to our tongue. For such purposes it is spoken in all the great seaports of the world. In addition to this trade use, we may note that a great variety of practical inventions carry their English names and terms around the world.
7. We also have the great reading public of the world. Germans read; but their 45,000,000 do not consume more than one eighth as much literary food as England and America, the Canadas and Australia. The English literature market is not only the greatest in the world—exceeding in one year all the literary produce of antiquity which has come down to us—but it is a market which grows rapidly. If a German or a Frenchman wishes to reach the largest number of minds, he must write in the English language. We have made more than half the fame of German authors by translating their works into our tongue. Some of the German authors have been wise enough to learn and to use our speech in their books.
8. French and German each had a special advantage over English fifty years ago. Frenchmen have long had a rare power of popularizing knowledge—a power of which they have made much less use than would have been expected. French is very rich in the power of accurate and plain statement of scientific truth. This power Englishmen have been for some time borrowing, and the fruits of such copying appears in the good fame and liberal incomes of our Huxleys and Proctors. There is no reason to doubt that we shall overtake the French in this path of progress; for we have an inexhaustible demand for popularizations of science. Thirty years ago Germans had a primacy in research. They made the world come to their universities to study and master the German method in investigation. I believe that, though this German primacy still exists, it has nearly reached its end. English students have not gone in droves to Germany to come back empty handed. Many of them have conquered the German method and transferred it to their own home and tongue.
9. France is already out of the race. She has but thirty-seven millions, and grows only at a snail’s pace. A Frenchman has recently described the stationary condition of his people in the Révue des deux Mondes in stronger terms than I could use. German is our only serious rival for the primacy. Is it a serious rivalry? The Germans are a prolific race. They lose millions by emigration, and still increase to an extent which makes all Frenchmen sad. But how shall forty-five millions shut up in old Europe overtake the one hundred and ten millions who have the great open fields of the world? If North America were as thickly populated as Germany we should count our hosts as three or four hundred millions. They have room at home; but we have vastly more room. In a century our North American English population will number 250,000,000. The rest of the English speaking world can hardly fail to grow enough to make our grand total 400,000,000. The next doubling of our tribe—not more than one hundred and fifty years from now—would put us so far in front of all competition that no language would contest the primacy with us. Besides, we have great possibilities of gains outside of our own tribes. South America is more and more under the influence of English and American ideas; the East is being anglicised by the English dominion in India, and by American and English missionary schools. Africa is an open question; but a vast English speaking population on the Dark Continent is a far more probable addition to our numbers than this American-English population was in 1492, or even in 1700.
Such seems to be the outlook. In a recent letter forecasting the English-speaking primacy of the world, Mr. Gladstone said: “Mr. Barham Zincke, no incompetent calculator, reckons that the English-speaking peoples of the world one hundred years hence will probably count a thousand millions.… A century back I suppose they were not much, if at all, beyond fifteen millions.” This primacy, he adds, “would demand no propaganda, no superlative ingenuity or effort; it ought to be an orderly and natural growth.… To gain it will need no preterhuman strength; to miss it will require some portentous degeneracy.” I have made much more modest estimates than those quoted by Mr. Gladstone. I attach most importance to the political value of English and the nation-building instinct of our tribe. The great rush forward from fifteen to one hundred and ten millions in a century is a result of our political facility.