Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

When Benjamin Franklin was in England in 1760, he received a letter from David Hume commenting on the style of an essay of his writing and on his choice of words; and in his reply Franklin modestly thanked his friend for the criticism, and took occasion to declare his hope that we Americans would always “make the best English of this island our standard.” And yet when France acknowledged the independence of the United States in 1778 and Franklin was sent to Paris as our minister, Congress duly considered the proper forms and ceremonies to be observed in doing business with foreign countries, and finally resolved that “all speeches or communications may, if the public ministers choose it, be in the language of their respective countries; and all replies or answers shall be in the language of the United States.”

What is “the language of the United States”? Is it “the best English” of Great Britain, as Franklin hoped it would always be? Franklin was unusually far-sighted, but even he could not foresee what is perhaps the most extraordinary event of the nineteenth century,—an era abounding in the extraordinary,—the marvelous spread and immense expansion of the English language. It is not only along the banks of the Thames and the Tweed and the Shannon that children are now losing irrecoverable hours on the many absurdities of English orthography: a like wanton wastefulness there is also on the shores of the Hudson, of the Mississippi, and of the Columbia, while the same A B C’s are parroted by the little ones of those who live where the Ganges rolls down its yellow sand and of those who dwell in the great island which is almost riverless. No parallel can be found in history for this sudden spreading out of the English language in the past hundred years—not even the diffusion of Latin during the century when the rule of Rome was most widely extended.

Among the scattered millions who now employ our common speech, in England itself, in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, in the United States and Canada, in India and in Australia, in Egypt and in South Africa, there is no stronger bond of union than the language itself. There is no likelihood that any political association will ever be sought or achieved. The tie that fastens the more independent colonies to the mother-country is loose enough now, even if it is never further relaxed; and less than half of those who have English for their mother-tongue owe any allegiance whatever to England. The English-speaking inhabitants of the British Empire are apparently fewer than the inhabitants of the American republic; and the population of the United Kingdom itself is only a little more than half the population of the United States.

To set down these facts is to point out that the English language is no longer a personal possession of the people of England. The power of the head of the British Empire over what used to be called the “King’s English” is now as little recognized as his power over what used to be called the “king’s evil.” We may regret that this is the case, or we may rejoice at it; but we cannot well deny the fact itself. And thus we are face to face with more than one very interesting question. What is going to become of the language now it is thus dispersed abroad and freed from all control by a central authority and exposed to all sorts of alien influences? Is it bound to become corrupted and to sink from its high estate into a mire of slang and into a welter of barbarously fashioned verbal novelties? What, more especially, is going to be the future of the English language here in America? Must we fear the dread possibility that the speech of the peoples on the opposite sides of the Western Ocean will diverge at last until the English language will divide into two branches, those who speak British being hardly able to understand those who speak American, and those who speak American being hardly able to understand those who speak British? Mark Twain is a humorist, it is true, but he is very shrewd and he has abundant common sense; and it was Mark Twain who declared a score of years ago that he spoke the “American language.”

The science of linguistics is among the youngest, and yet it has already established itself so firmly on the solid ground of ascertained truth that it has been able to overthrow with ease one and another of the many theories which were accepted without question before it came into being. For example, time was—and the time is not so very remote, it may be remarked—time was when the little group of more or less highly educated men who were at the center of authority in the capital of any nation had no doubt whatsoever as to the superiority of their way of speaking their own language over the manner in which it might be spoken by the vast majority of their fellow-citizens deprived of the advantages of a court training. This little group set the standard of speech; and the standard they set was accepted as final and not to be tampered with under penalty of punishment for the crime of lese-majesty. They held that any divergence from the customs of speaking and writing they themselves cherished was due to ignorance and probably to obstinacy. They believed that the court dialect which they had been brought up to use was the only true and original form of the language; and they swiftly stigmatized as a gross impropriety every usage and every phrase with which they themselves did not happen to be familiar. And in thus maintaining the sole validity of their personal habits of speech they had no need for self-assertion, since it never entered into the head of any one not belonging to the court circle to question for a second the position thus tacitly declared.

Yet if modern methods of research have made anything whatever indisputable in the history of human speech, they have completely disproved the assumption which underlies this implicit claim of the courtiers. We know now that the urban dialect is not the original language of which the rural dialects are but so many corruptions. We know, indeed, that the rural dialects are often really closer to the original tongue than the urban dialect; and that the urban dialect itself was once as rude as its fellows, and that it owes its preëminence rarely to any superiority of its own over its rivals, but rather to the fact that it chanced to be the speech of a knot of men more masterful than the inhabitants of any other village, and able therefore to expand their village to a town and at last to a city, which imposed its rule on the neighboring villages, the inhabitants of these being by that time forgetful that they had once striven with it on almost equal terms. Generally it is the stability given by political pre-eminence which leads to the development of a literature, without which no dialect can retain its linguistic supremacy.

When the sturdy warriors whose homes were clustered on one or another of the seven hills of Rome began to make alliances and conquests, they rendered possible the future development of their rough Italic into the Latin language which has left its mark on almost every modern European tongue. The humble allies of the early Romans, who possessed dialects of an equal antiquity and of an equal possibility of improvement, could not but obey the laws of imitation; and they sought, perforce, to bring their vocabulary and their syntax into conformity with that of the men who had shown themselves more powerful. Thus one of the Italic dialects was singled out by fortune for an extraordinary future, and the other Italic dialects were left in obscurity, altho they were each of them as old as the Roman and as available for development. These other dialects have even suffered the ignominy of being supposed to be corruptions of their triumphant brother.

The French philologist Darmesteter concisely explained the stages of this development of one local speech at the expense of its neighbors. As it gains in dignity its fellows fall into the shadow. A local speech thus neglected is a patois; and a local speech which achieves the dignity of literature is a dialect. These written tongues spread on all sides and impose themselves on the surrounding population as more noble than the patois. Thus a linguistic province is created, and its dialect tends constantly to crush out the various patois once freely used within its boundaries.

In time one of these provinces becomes politically more powerful than the others and extends its rule over one after another of them. As it does this, its dialect replaces the dialects of the provinces as the official tongue, and it tends constantly to crush out these other dialects, as they had tended constantly to crush out the various patois. Thus the local speech of the population of the tiny island in the Seine, which is the nucleus of the city of Paris, rose slowly to the dignity of a written dialect, and the local speech of each of the neighboring villages sank into a patois—altho originally it was in no wise inferior. In the course of centuries Paris became the capital of France, and its provincial dialect became the official language of the kingdom. When the kings of France extended their rule over Normandy and over Burgundy and over Provence, the Parisian dialect succeeded in imposing itself upon the inhabitants of those provinces as superior; and in time the Norman dialect and the Burgundian and the Provençal were ousted.

The dialect of the province in which the king dwelt and in which the business of governing was carried on, could not but dispossess the dialects of all the other provinces; and thus the French language, as we know it now, was once only the Parisian dialect. Yet there was apparently no linguistic inferiority of the langue d’oc to the langue d’oil; and the reasons for the dominion of the one and the decadence of the other are purely political. Of course, as the Parisian dialect grew and spread itself, it was enriched by locutions from the other provincial dialects, and it was simplified by the dropping of many of its grammatical complexities not common to the most of the others.