Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/492

470 understood and employed on every continent and in every clime, then it is our bounden duty to help prepare the way for taking off its neck this heavy millstone. How heavy, we are hardly able to realize, having ourselves well-nigh or quite forgotten the toil it once cost us to learn to read and speak correctly; yet we cannot help seeing how serious an obstacle to the wide extension of a language is a mode of writing which converts it, from one of the easiest in the world, into one of the hardest, for a foreigner to acquire and use.

The English is already, perhaps, spoken and written as mother-tongue by a greater number of persons than any other existing dialect of high cultivation; and its sphere seems to be widening, at home and abroad, more rapidly than that of any other. If it ever becomes a world-language, it will do so, of course, not on account of its superiority as a form of human speech—since no one ever yet abandoned his own vernacular and adopted another because the latter was a better language—but by the effect of social and political conditions, which shall widen the boundaries of the English-speaking community. Yet we cannot but be desirous to convince ourselves that it is worthy of so high a destiny. To trust our own prepossessions upon this point may be very easy and comfortable, but is not quite safe. The universal tendency among men to exaggerate the advantages of their own mode of speech and depreciate those of others would make us, in spite of our sincere attempts at impartiality, more than just to our beloved mother-tongue—even though we might be willing to allow that, as all advantages cannot be found united in one individual, each of its rivals among the cultivated dialects of the present or of the past may surpass it in one or another respect. It does not lie in our way to take up the matter seriously, inquiring and determining what is the absolute rank of the English among languages; yet it may be worth while to give a few moments' consideration to one or two points that bear upon the question.

We have, in the first place, already had occasion to notice that a language is just what the people to whom it belongs