Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/44

22 mean by no means the same feelings. How pregnant with sacred meaning are home, patriotism, faith to some, while others utter or hear them with cool indifference! It is needless, however, to multiply examples. Not half the words in our familiar speech would be identically defined by any considerable number of those who employ them every day. Nay, who knows not that verbal disputes, discussions turning on the meaning of words, are the most frequent, bitter, and interminable of controversies?

Clearly, therefore, we are guilty of no paradox 1n maintaining that, while we all speak the English language, the English of no two individuals among us is precisely the same: it is not the same in form; it is not the same in extent; it is not the same in meaning.

But what, then, is the English language? We answer: It is the immense aggregate of the articulated signs for thought accepted by, and current among, a certain vast community which we call the English-speaking people, embracing the principal portion of the inhabitants of our own country and of Great Britain, with all those who elsewhere in the world talk like them. It is the sum of the separate languages of all the members of this community. Or&mdash;since each one says some things, or says them in a way, not to be accepted as in the highest sense English&mdash;it is their average rather than their sum; it is that part of the aggregate which is supported by the usage of the majority; but of a majority made in great part by culture and education, not by numbers alone. It is a mighty region of speech, of somewhat fluctuating and uncertain boundaries, whereof each speaker occupies a portion, and a certain central tract is included in the portion of all: there they meet on common ground; off it, they are strangers to one another. Although one language, it includes numerous varieties, of greatly differing kind and degree: individual varieties, class varieties, local varieties. Almost any two persons who speak it may talk so as to be unintelligible to each other. The one fact which gives it unity is, that all who speak it may, to a considerable extent, and on subjects of the most general and pressing interest, talk so as to understand one another.