Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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