Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/144

 556 The English Language in America longer used to satisfy elementary social needs. A living lan- guage is one of the mores of a social group ; it is neither a bio- logical growth unaffected by human intervention nor a work of art given its form for all time by a single act of human creation. Consequently it will vary within the group somewhat according to the variation in other respects to be found in the individuals' comprising it, and between groups it will vary still more. Like other mores it will be subject to modification by time. But the necessity for mutual intelligibility within the group will greatly restrict the play of individual whim; between groups this force will operate somehow in proportion to the immediacy of their contacts. In a cultured city like ancient Rome or mediaeval Florence a group of people might raise and maintain a literary standard around which literary people of other groups would rally. Or, again, a convenient dialect might be somewhat arbitrarily chosen for a particular literary task, as Luther chose the dialect of the Saxon chancellary for his trans- lation of the Bible, and this dialect, with more or less conscious modification from time to time, might remain the standard literary language. In all these cases the great mass of people, not wholly uninfluenced by the literary language perhaps, would go on speaking their own dialects, just as the Romans did until their language of the street, of the camp, and of the pro- vinces broke up into the larger groups, such as French, Spanish, and the rest, each containing within itself many smaller groups ; or just as the Italians and the Germans have gone on speaking their dialects to the present day, learning their literary language as best they can besides. The history of English is somewhat different from any of these. In origin, Modern English, as it appears everywhere in books and as it falls from the lips of the vast majority of speak- ers, is the dialect of a city, London. But unlike the case of Rome, there was at. the outset presumably no great difference between the language of literature and the language of every day, and, unlike Florence, London was the chief city of a steadily unifying country. With the changing language of the city, its gradual loss of Southern, or Saxon, forms and its gradual acquirement of Northern, or Anglian, forms, the lan- guage of literature kept closely in touch. By the early six- teenth century, though details are shifting, the outlines of