The Indo-European family of languages: Celtic

The Celtic languages formed at one time one of the most extensive groups in the IndoEuropean family. At the beginning of the Christian era the Celts were found in Gaul and Spain, in Great Britain, in western Germany, and northern Italy—indeed, they covered the greater part of Western Europe. A few centuries earlier their triumphal progress had extended even into Greece and Asia Minor. The steady retreat of Celtic before advancing Italic and Germanic tongues is one of the surprising phenomena of history. Today Celtic languages are found only in the far corners of France and the British Isles; in the areas in which they were once dominant they have left but little trace of their presence.

The language of the Celts in Gaul who were conquered by Caesar is known as Gallic. Since it was early replaced by Latin we know next to nothing about it. A few inscriptions, some proper names (cf. Orgetorix), one fragmentary text, and a small number of words preserved in modern French are all that survive. With respect to the Celtic languages in Britain we are better off, although the many contradictory theories of Celticists

 make it impossible to say with any confidence how the Celts came to England. The older view, which is now questioned, holds that the first to come were Goidelic or Gaelic Celts. Some of these may have been driven to Ireland by the later invaders and from there may have spread into Scotland and the Isle of Man. Their language is represented in modern times by Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx. The later Brythonic Celts, after occupying for some centuries what is now England, were in turn driven westward by Germanic invaders in the fifth century. Some of the fugitives crossed over into Brittany. The modern representatives of the Brythonic division are Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.The remnants of this one-time extensive group of languages are everywhere losing ground at the present day. Spoken by minorities in France and the British Isles, these languages are faced with the competition of two languages of wider communication, and some seem destined not to survive this competition. Cornish became extinct in the eighteenth century, and Manx, once spoken by all the native inhabitants of the Isle of Man, has died out since World War II. In Scotland Gaelic is found only in the Highlands. It is spoken by 75,000 people, of whom fewer than 5,000 do not know English as well.

Welsh is still spoken by about one-quarter of the people, but the spread of English among them is indicated by the fact that the number of those who speak only Welsh had dropped from 30 percent in 1891 to 2 percent in 1950 and is still slowly decreasing. Irish is spoken by about 500,000 people, most of whom are bilingual. Whether nationalist sentiment will succeed in arresting the declining trend that has been observable here as in the other Celtic territory remains to be seen. If language planning efforts fail, it seems inevitable that eventually another branch of the Indo-European family of languages will disappear.

The Indo-European family of languages: Germanic

The common form that the languages of the Germanic branch had before they became differentiated is known as Germanic or Proto-Germanic. It antedates the earliest written records of the family and is reconstructed by philologists in the same way as is the parent Indo-European. The languages descended from it fall into three groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic.

The principal language of East Germanic is Gothic. By the third century the Goths had spread from the Vistula to the shore of the Black Sea and in the following century they were Christianized by a missionary named Ulfilas (311–383), whose father seems to have been a Goth and his mother a Greek (Cappadocian). Our knowledge of Gothic is almost wholly due to a translation of the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament made by Ulfilas. Except for some runic inscriptions in Scandinavia it is the earliest record of a Germanic language we possess. For a time the Goths played a prominent part in European history, including in their extensive conquests both Italy, by the Ostrogoths, and Spain, by the Visigoths. In these districts, however, their language soon gave place to Latin, and even elsewhere it seems not to have maintained a very tenacious existence. Gothic survived longest in the Crimea, where vestiges of it were noted down in the sixteenth century. To the East Germanic branch belonged also Burgundian and Vandalic, but our knowledge of these languages is confined to a small number of proper names.

North Germanic is found in Scandinavia, Denmark, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. Runic inscriptions from the third century preserve our earliest traces of the language. In its earlier form the common Scandinavian language is conveniently spoken of as Old Norse. From about the eleventh century on, dialectal differences become noticeable. The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups: an eastern group including Swedish and Danish, and a western group including Norwegian and Icelandic. Norwegian ceased to be a literary language in the fourteenth century, and Danish (with Norwegian elements) is one written language of Norway.

Of the early Scandinavian languages Old Icelandic is by far the most literary. Iceland was colonized by settlers from Norway about A.D. 874 and early preserved a body of heroic literature unsurpassed among the Germanic peoples. Among the more important monuments are the Elder or Poetic Edda, a collection of poems that probably date from the tenth or eleventh century, the Younger or Prose Edda compiled by Snorri Sturluson (1178–1241), and about forty sagas, or prose epics, in which the lives and exploits of various traditional figures are related.

West Germanic is of chief interest to us as the group to which English belongs. It is divided into two branches, High and Low German, by the operation of a Second (or High German) Sound-Shift analogous to that described above as Grimm’s Law. This change, by which West Germanic p, t, k, d, etc. were changed into other sounds, occurred about A.D. 600 in the southern or mountainous part of the Germanic area but did not take place in the lowlands to the north. Accordingly in early times we distinguish as Low German tongues Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English. The last two are closely related and constitute a special or Anglo-Frisian subgroup.

Old Saxon has become the essential constituent of modern Low German or Plattdeutsch; Old Low Franconian, with some mixture of Frisian and Saxon elements, is the basis of modern Dutch in the Netherlands and Flemish in northern Belgium; and Frisian survives in the Netherland province of Friesland, in a small part of Schleswig, in the islands along the coast, and other places. High German comprises a number of dialects (Middle, Rhenish, and East Franconian, Bavarian, Alemannic, etc.). It is divided chronologically into Old High German (before 1100), Middle High German (1100–1500), and Modern High German (since 1500). High German, especially as spoken in the midlands and used in the imperial chancery, was popularized by Luther’s translation of the Bible (1522–1532) and since the sixteenth century has gradually established itself as the literary language of Germany.

The Indo-European family of languages: Balto-Slavic

The Balto-Slavic branch covers a vast area in the eastern part of Europe. It falls into two groups, the Baltic and the Slavic, which, in spite of differences, have sufficient features in common to justify their being classed together.

There are three Baltic languages: Prussian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. Prussian is now extinct, having been displaced by German since the seventeenth century. Latvian is the language of about two million people in Latvia. Lithuanian is spoken by about three million people in the Baltic state of Lithuania. It is important among the Indo-European languages because of its conservatism. It is sometimes said that a Lithuanian peasant can understand certain simple phrases in Sanskrit. Although the statement implies too much, Lithuanian preserves some very old features that have disappeared from practically all the other languages of the family.

The similarities among the various languages of the Slavic group indicate that as late as the seventh or eighth century of our era they were practically identical or at least were united by frequent intercourse. At the present time they fall into three divisions: East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic. The first two still cover contiguous areas, but the South Slavs, in the Balkan peninsula, are now separated from the rest by a belt of nonSlavic people, the Hungarians and the Romanians.

The earliest form in which we possess a Slavic language is a part of the Bible and certain liturgical texts translated by the missionaries Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. The language of these texts is South Slavic, but it probably approximates with considerable closeness the common Slavic from which all the Slavic languages have come. It is known as Old Church Slavonic or Old Bulgarian and continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages and indeed well into modern times as the ecclesiastical language of the Orthodox Church.

East Slavic includes three varieties. Chief of these is Russian, the language of about 175 million people. It is found throughout the north, east, and central parts of Russia, was formerly the court language, and is still the official and literary language of the country. Belorussian (White Russian) is the language of about 9 million people in Belarus and adjacent parts of Poland. Ukrainian is spoken by about 50 million people in Ukraine. Nationalist ambitions have led the Ukrainians to stress the difference between their language and Russian, a difference that, from the point of view of mutual intelligibility, causes some difficulty with the spoken language. Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian constitute the largest group of Slavic languages.

West Slavic includes four languages. Of these Polish is the largest, spoken by about 36 million people within Poland, by about 5 million in the United States, and by smaller numbers in the former Soviet Union and other countries. Next in size are the mutually intelligible languages of the Czech Republic and Slovakia: Czech, spoken by about 10 million people, and Slovak, spoken by 5 million. The fourth language, Sorbian, is spoken by only 100,000 people in Germany, in a district a little northeast of Dresden.

South Slavic includes Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, and modern Macedonian, not to be confused with ancient Macedonian, an Indo-European language of uncertain affinity. Bulgarian was spoken in the eastern part of the Balkan peninsula when the region was overrun by a non-Slavic people. But the conqueror was absorbed by the conquered and adopted their language. Modern Bulgarian has borrowed extensively from Turkish for the language of everyday use, while the literary language is much closer to Russian. The history of Yugoslavia and the fortunes of its languages illustrate tragically the quip that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Serbo-Croatian represents the union of Serbian, formerly the language of Serbia, and Croatian, spoken before World War I by the Croats of Bosnia and Croatia. The two languages are practically identical but use different alphabets. With the breakup of Yugoslavia we can expect references to Serbo-Croatian to be replaced by references separately to Serbian and Croatian. Slovene is spoken by about 1.5 million people in Slovenia, at the head of the Adriatic.

The Slavic languages constitute a more homogeneous group than the languages of some of the other branches. They have diverged less from the common type than those, for example, of the Germanic branch and in a number of respects preserve a rather archaic aspect. Moreover the people speaking the Baltic languages must have lived for many centuries in fairly close contact with the Slavs after the two had separated from the parent Indo-European community.

The Indo-European family of languages: Italic

The Italic branch has its center in Italy, and to most people Italy in ancient times suggests Rome and the language of Rome, Latin. But the predominant position occupied by Latin in the historical period should not make us forget that Latin was only one of a number of languages once found in this area. The geographical situation and agreeable climate of the peninsula seem frequently and at an early date to have invited settlement, and the later population represents a remarkably diverse culture. We do not know much about the early neolithic inhabitants; they had been largely replaced or absorbed before the middle of the first millennium B.C.

But we have knowledge of a number of languages spoken in different districts by the sixth century before our era. In the west, especially from the Tiber north, a powerful and aggressive people spoke Etruscan, a non-Indo-European language. In northwestern Italy was situated the little known Ligurian. Venetic in the northeast and Messapian in the extreme southeast were apparently offshoots of Illyrian, already mentioned. And in southern Italy and Sicily, Greek was the language of numerous Greek colonies. All these languages except Etruscan were apparently IndoEuropean. More important were the languages of the Italic branch itself. Chief of these in the light of subsequent history was Latin, the language of Latium and its principal city, Rome. Closely related to Latin were Umbrian, spoken in a limited area northeast of Latium, and Oscan, the language of the Samnites and of most of the southern peninsula except the extreme projections. All of these languages were in time driven out by Latin as the political influence of Rome became dominant throughout Italy. Nor was the extension of Latin limited to the Italian peninsula. As Rome colonized Spain and Gaul, the district west of the Black Sea, northern Africa, the islands of the Mediterranean, and even Britain, Latin spread into all these regions until its limits became practically co-terminous with those of the Roman Empire. And in the greater part of this area it has remained the language, though in altered form, to the present day.

The various languages that represent the survival of Latin in the different parts of the Roman Empire are known as the Romance or Romanic languages. Some of them have since spread into other territory, particularly in the New World. The most extensive of the Romance languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. French is primarily the language of northern France, although it is the language of literature and education throughout the country. In the Middle Ages it was divided into a number of dialects, especially Norman, Picard, Burgundian, and that of the Ile-de-France. But with the establishment of the Capetians as kings of France and the rise of Paris as the national capital, the dialect of Paris or the Ile-de-France gradually won recognition as the official and literary language. Since the thirteenth century the Paris dialect has been standard French. In the southern half of France the language differed markedly from that of the north. From the word for yes the language of the north was called the langue d’oïl, that of the south the langue d’oc. Nowadays the latter is more commonly known as Provençal. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was the language of an innovative literature, the lyrics of the troubadours, but it has since yielded to the political and social prestige of French. A patriotic effort at the close of the nineteenth century, corresponding to similar movements on behalf of Irish, Norwegian, and other submerged languages, failed to revive the language as a medium of literature, and Provençal is today merely the regional speech of southern France. In the Iberian peninsula Spanish and Portuguese, because of their proximity and the similar conditions under which they have developed, have remained fairly close to each other. In spite of certain differences of vocabulary and inflection and considerable differences in the sounds of the spoken language, a Spaniard can easily read Portuguese. The use of Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America and in Mexico has already been referred to. Italian has had the longest continuous history in its original location of any of the Romance languages, because it is nothing more than the Latin language as this language has continued to be spoken in the streets of Rome from the founding of the city. It is particularly important as the language of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and the vernacular language in which the cultural achievements of the Renaissance first found expression. Romanian is the easternmost of the Romance languages, representing the continued influence of Roman legions in ancient Dacia. In addition to these six languages, about a dozen Romance languages are spoken by smaller populations. Other languages on the Iberian peninsula are Catalan, a language of the northeast but also found in Corsica, and one with an extensive literature, and Galician in the northwest, similar to both Spanish and Portuguese, having features of each, just as Catalan shares features of Provençal and Spanish. The Rhaeto-Romanic group in southeastern Switzerland and adjacent parts of the Tyrol includes Romansch and dialects in which Germanic elements are especially prominent. Walloon is a dialect of French spoken in southern Belgium.

The Romance languages, while representing a continuous evolution from Latin, are not derived from the Classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil. Classical Latin was a literary language with an elaborate and somewhat artificial grammar. The spoken language of the masses, Vulgar Latin (from Latin vulgus, the common people), differed from it not only in being simpler in inflection and syntax but also to a certain extent divergent in vocabulary. In Classical Latin the word for horse was equus, but the colloquial word was caballus. It is from the colloquial word that French cheval, Provençal caval, Spanish caballo, Italian cavallo, etc., are derived. In like manner where one wrote pugna (fight), urbs (city), os (mouth), the popular, spoken word was battualia (Fr. bataille), villa (Fr. ville), bucca (Fr. bouche). So verberare=battuere (Fr. battre), osculari=basiare (Fr. baiser), ignis=focus (Fr. feu), ludus=jocus (Fr. jeu). It was naturally the Vulgar Latin of the marketplace and camp that was carried into the different Roman provinces. That this Vulgar Latin developed differently in the different parts of Europe in which it was introduced is explained by a number of factors. In the first place, as Gustav Gröber observed, Vulgar Latin, like all language, was constantly changing, and because the Roman provinces were established at different times and the language carried into them would be more or less the language then spoken in the streets of Rome, there would be initial differences in the Vulgar Latin of the different colonies.

These differences would be increased by separation and the influence of the languages spoken by the native populations as they adopted the new language. The Belgae and the Celts in Gaul, described by Caesar, differed from the Iberians in Spain. Each of these peoples undoubtedly modified Latin in accordance with the grammars of their own languages, as normally happens when languages come into contact.

It is not difficult to understand the divergence of the Romance languages, and it is not the least interesting feature of the Romance group that we can observe here in historical time the formation of a number of distinct languages from a single parent speech. Such a process of progressive differentiation has brought about, over a greater area and a longer period of time, the differences among the languages of the whole Indo-European family

The Indo-European family of languages: Albanian

Northwest of Greece on the eastern coast of the Adriatic is the small branch named Albanian. It is possibly the modern remnant of Illyrian, a language spoken in ancient times in the northwestern Balkans, but we have too little knowledge of this early tongue to be sure. Moreover, our knowledge of Albanian, except for a few words, extends back only as far as the fifteenth century of our era, and, when we first meet with it, the vocabulary is so mixed with Latin, Greek, Turkish, and Slavonic elements—owing to conquests and other causes—that it is somewhat difficult to isolate the original Albanian. For this reason its position among the languages of the Indo-European family was slow to be recognized. It was formerly classed with the Hellenic group, but since the beginning of the present century it has been recognized as an independent member of the family.

The Indo-European family of languages: Hellenic

At the dawn of history the Aegean was occupied by a number of populations that differed in race and in language from the Greeks who entered these regions later. In Lemnos, in Cyprus, and Crete especially, and also on the Greek mainland and in Asia Minor, inscriptions have been found written in languages which may in some cases be IndoEuropean and in others are certainly not. In the Balkans and in Asia Minor were languages such as Phrygian and Armenian, already mentioned, and certainly IndoEuropean, as well as others (Lydian, Carian, and Lycian) that show some resemblance to the Indo-European type but whose relations are not yet determined. In Asia Minor the Hittites, who spoke an Indo-European language (see § 27), possessed a kingdom that lasted from about 2000 to 1200 B.C.; and in the second millennium B.C. the eastern Mediterranean was dominated, at least commercially, by a Semitic people, the Phoenicians, who exerted a considerable influence upon the Hellenic world.

Into this mixture of often little-known populations and languages the Greeks penetrated from the north shortly after a date about 2000 B.C. The entrance of the Hellenes into the Aegean was a gradual one and proceeded in a series of movements by groups speaking different dialects of the common language. They spread not only through the mainland of Greece, absorbing the previous populations, but also into the islands of the Aegean and the coast of Asia Minor. The earliest great literary monuments of Greek are the Homeric poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, believed to date from the eighth century B.C. Of the Greek language we recognize five principal dialectal groups: the Ionic, of which Attic is a subdialect, found (except for Attic) in Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean Sea; Aeolic in the north and northeast; Arcadian-Cyprian in the Peloponnesus and Cyprus; Doric, which later replaced Arcadian in the Peloponnesus; and Northwest Greek in the north central and western part of the Greek mainland. Of these, Attic, the dialect of the city of Athens, is by far the most studied. It owes its supremacy partly to the dominant political and commercial position attained by Athens in the fifth century, partly to the great civilization that grew up there. The achievements of the Athenians in architecture and sculpture, in science, philosophy, and literature in the great age of Pericles (495–429 B.C.) and in the century following were extremely important for subsequent civilization. In Athens were assembled the great writers of Greece—the dramatists Æchylus, Euripides, and Sophocles in tragedy, Aristophanes in comedy, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the orator Demosthenes, the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Largely because of the political and cultural prestige of Athens, the Attic dialect became the basis of a koiné or common Greek that from the fourth century superseded the other dialects; the conquests of Alexander (336–323 B.C.) established this language in Asia Minor and Syria, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, as the general language of the eastern Mediterranean for purposes of international communication. It is chiefly familiar to modern times as the language of the New Testament and, through its employment in Constantinople and the Eastern Empire, as the medium of an extensive Byzantine literature. The various dialects into which the language of modern Greece is divided represent the local differentiation of this koiné through the course of centuries. At the present time two varieties of Greek (commonly called Romaic, from its being the language of the eastern Roman Empire) are observable in Greece. One, the popular or demotic, is the natural language of the people; the other, the “pure,” represents a conscious effort to restore the vocabulary and even some of the inflections of ancient Greek. Both are used in various schools and universities, but the current official position favors the demotic.

The Indo-European family of languages: Armenian

Armenian is found in a small area south of the Caucasus Mountains and the eastern end of the Black Sea. The penetration of Armenians into this region is generally put between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. They evidently came into their present location by way of the Balkans and across the Hellespont. The newcomers conquered a population of which remnants are still perhaps to be found in the Caucasus and whose language may have influenced Armenian in matters of accent and phonology. Armenian shows a shifting of certain consonants that recalls the shifts in Germanic described above and which, like those, may be due to contact with other languages. Moreover, like the south Caucasus languages, Armenian lacks grammatical gender.

Armenian is not linked to any other special group of the Indo-European family by common features such as connect Indian with Iranian. It occupies a somewhat isolated position. But in ancient times Thrace and Macedonia were occupied by two peoples—the Thraco-Phrygians, whom Herodotus mentions as very numerous, and the Macedonians, whose kings for a time adopted Greek and enjoyed a short but brilliant career in Greek history. The Phrygians, like the Armenians, passed into Asia Minor and are familiar to us as the Trojans of Homer. Their language shows certain affinities with Armenian; and, if we knew more about it, we should probably find in it additional evidence for the early association of the two peoples. Unfortunately we have only scanty remains of Phrygian and Macedonian—chiefly place names, glosses, and inscriptions—enough merely to prove their Indo-European character and give a clue to the linguistic affiliation.

Armenian is known to us from about the fifth century of our era through a translation of the Bible in the language. There is a considerable Armenian literature, chiefly historical and theological. The Armenians for several centuries were under Persian domination, and the vocabulary shows such strong Iranian influence that Armenian was at one time classed as an Iranian language. Numerous contacts with Semitic languages, with Greek, and with Turkish have contributed further to give the vocabulary a rich character.

The Indo-European family of languages: Iranian

Northwest of India and covering the great plateau of Iran is the important group of languages called Iranian. The Indo-European population that settled this region had lived and probably traveled for a considerable time in company with the members of the Indian branch. Such an association accounts for a number of linguistic features that the two groups have in common. Of the people engaged in this joint migration a part seem to have decided to settle down on this great tableland while the rest continued on into India.

Subsequent movements have carried Iranian languages into territories as remote as southern Russia and central China. From early times the region has been subjected to Semitic influence, and many of the early texts are preserved in Semitic scripts that make accurate interpretation difftcult. Fortunately the past few decades have seen the recovery of a number of early documents, some containing hitherto unknown varieties of Iranian speech, which have contributed greatly to the elucidation of this important group of languages.

The earliest remains of the Iranian branch fall into two divisions, an eastern and a western, represented respectively by Avestan and Old Persian. Avestan is the language of the Avesta, the sacred book of the Zoroastrians. It is some-times called Zend, although the designation is not wholly accurate. Strictly speaking, Zend is the language only of certain late commentaries on the sacred text. The Avesta consists of two parts, the Gathas or metrical sermons of Zoroaster, which in their original form may go back as far as 1000 B.C., and the Avesta proper, an extensive collection of hymns, legends, prayers, and legal prescriptions that seem to spring from a period several hundred years later. There is considerable difference in the language of the two parts. The other division of Iranian, Old Persian, is preserved only in certain cuneiform inscriptions which record chiefly the conquests and achievements of Darius (522–486 B.C.) and Xerxes (486–466 B.C.). 

The most extensive is a trilingual record (in Persian, Assyrian, and Elamite) carved in the side of a mountain at Behistan, in Media, near the city of Kirmanshah. Besides a representation of Darius with nine shackled prisoners, the rebel chieftains subjugated by him, there are many columns of text in cuneiform characters. A later form of this language, found in the early centuries of our era, is known as Middle Iranian or Pahlavi, the official language of church and state during the dynasty of the Sassanids (A.D. 226– 652). This is the ancestor of modern Persian. Persian, also known as Farsi, has been the language of an important culture and an extensive literature since the ninth century. Chief among the literary works in this language is the great Persian epic the Shahnamah. Persian contains a large Arabic admixture so that today its vocabulary seems almost as much Arabic as Iranian. In addition to Persian, several other languages differing more or less from it are today in use in various provinces of the old empire—Afghan or Pashto and Baluchi in the eastern territories of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Kurdish in the west, in Kurdistan. Besides these larger groups there are numerous languages and dialects in the highlands of the Pamir, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, and in the valleys of the Caucasus.

The Indo-European family of languages: Indian

The oldest literary texts preserved in any Indo-European language are the Vedas or sacred books of India. These fall into four groups, the earliest of which, the Rig-veda, is a collection of about a thousand hymns, and the latest, the Atharva-veda, a body of incantations and ritual formulas connected with many kinds of current religious practice. These books form the basis of Brahman philosophy and for a long time were preserved by oral transmission by the priests before being committed to writing. It is therefore difftcult to assign definite dates to them, but the oldest apparently go back to nearly 1500 B.C. The language in which they are written is known as Sanskrit, or to distinguish it from a later form of the language, Vedic Sanskrit. This language is also found in certain prose writings containing directions for the ritual, theological commentary, and the like (the Brahmanas), meditations for the use of recluses (the Aranyakas), philosophical speculations (the Upanishads), and rules concerning various aspects of religious and private life (the Sutras).

The use of Sanskrit was later extended to various writings outside the sphere of religion, and under the influence of native grammarians, the most important of whom was Panini in the fourth century B.C., it was given a fixed, literary form. In this form it is known as Classical Sanskrit. Classical Sanskrit  is the medium of an extensive Indian literature including the two great national epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, a large body of drama, much lyric and didactic poetry, and numerous works of a scientific and philosophical character. It is still cultivated as a learned language and formerly held a place in India similar to that occupied by Latin in medieval Europe. At an early date it ceased to be a spoken language.

Alongside of Sanskrit there existed a large number of local dialects in colloquial use, known as Prakrits. A number of these eventually attained literary form; one in particular, Pāli, about the middle of the sixth century B.C. became the language of Buddhism. From these various colloquial dialects have descended the present languages of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, spoken by some 600 million people. The most important of these are Hindi, Urdu (the official language of Pakistan), Bengali (the official language of Bangladesh), Punjabi, and Marathi. Urdu is by origin and present structure closely related to Hindi, both languages deriving from Hindustani, the colloquial form of speech that for four centuries was widely used for intercommunication throughout northern India. Urdu differs from Hindi mainly in its considerable mixture of Persian and Arabic and in being written in the Perso-Arabic script instead of Sanskrit characters. Romany, the language of the Gypsies, represents a dialect of northwestern India which from about the fifth century A.D. was carried through Persia and into Armenia and from there has spread through Europe and even into America.

The Indo-European Family

The languages thus brought into relationship by descent or progressive differentiation from a parent speech are conveniently called a family of languages. Various names have been used to designate this family. In books written a century ago the term Aryan was commonly employed. It has now been generally abandoned and when found today is used in a more restricted sense to designate the languages of the family located in India and the plateau of Iran. A more common term is Indo-Germanic, which is the most usual designation among German philologists, but it is open to the objection of giving undue emphasis to the Germanic languages.

The term now most widely employed is IndoEuropean, suggesting more clearly the geographical extent of the family. The parent tongue from which the Indo-European languages have sprung had already become divided and scattered before the dawn of history. When we meet with the various peoples by whom these languages are spoken they have lost all knowledge of their former association. Consequently we have no written record of the common Indo-European language. By a comparison of its descendants, however, it is possible to form a fair idea of it and to make plausible reconstructions of its lexicon and inflections. 

The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to one another, the similarity bearing a more or less direct relationship to their geographical distribution. They accordingly fall into eleven principal groups: Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian. These are the branches of the Indo-European family tree, and we shall look briefly at each.

Grimm’s Law

A further important step was taken when in 1822 a German philologist, Jacob Grimm, following up a suggestion of a Danish contemporary, Rasmus Rask, formulated an explanation that systematically accounted for the correspondences between certain consonants in the Germanic languages and those found for example in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. His explanation, although subsequently modified and in some of the details of its operation still a subject of dispute, is easily illustrated. According to Grimm, a p in Indo-European, preserved as such in Latin and Greek, was changed to an f in the Germanic languages. Thus we should look for the English equivalent of Latin piscis or pēs to begin with an f, and this is what we actually find, in fish and foot respectively. What is true of p is true also of t and k: in other words, the original voiceless stops (p, t, k) were changed to fricatives (f, þ, h). So Latin trēs=English three, Latin centum=English hundred. A similar correspondence can be shown for certain other groups of consonants, and the Consequently Sanskrit bhárāmi (Greek )=English bear, Sanskrit  dhā=English do, Latin hostis (from *ghostis)=English guest. And the original voiced stops (b, d, g) changed to voiceless ones in the Germanic languages, so that Latin cannabis=English hemp (showing also the shift of initial k to h), Latin decem=English ten, Latin genu=English knee. In High German some of these consonants underwent a further change, known as the Second or High German Sound-Shift. It accounts for such differences as we see in English open and German offen, English eat and German essen.formulation of these correspondences is known as Grimm’s Law. The cause of the change is not known. It must have taken place sometime after the segregation of the Germanic from neighboring dialects of the parent language. There are words in Finnish borrowed from Germanic that do not show the change and that therefore must have resulted from a contact between Germanic and Finnish before the change occurred. There is also evidence that the shifting was still occurring as late as about the fifth century B.C. It is often assumed that the change was due to contact with a non-Germanic population. The contact could have resulted from the migration of the Germanic tribes or from the penetration of a foreign population into Germanic territory. Whatever its cause, the Germanic sound-shift is the most distinctive feature marking off the Germanic languages from the languages to which they are related.

Certain apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law were subsequently explained by Karl Verner and others. It was noted that between such a pair of words as Latin centum and English hundred the correspondence between the c and h was according to rule, but that between the t and d was not. The d in the English word should have been a voiceless fricative, that is, a þ. In 1875 Verner showed that when the Indo-European accent was not on the vowel immediately preceding, such voiceless fricatives became voiced in Germanic. In West Germanic the resulting ð became a d, and the word hundred is therefore quite regular in its correspondence with centum. The explanation was of importance in accounting for the forms of the preterite tense in many strong verbs. Thus in Old English the preterite singular of cweþan (to say) is ic cwœþ but the plural is we In the latter word the accent was originally on the ending, as it was in the past participle (cweden), where we also have a d.

The formulation of this explanation is known as Verner’s Law, and it was of great significance in vindicating the claim of regularity for the sound-changes that Grimm’s Law had attempted to define.

The Discovery of Sanskrit

 The most important discovery leading to this hypothesis was the recognition that Sanskrit, a language of ancient India, was one of the languages of the group. This was first suggested in the latter part of the eighteenth century and fully established by the beginning of the nineteenth.1 The extensive literature of India, reaching back further than that of any of the European languages, preserves features of the common language much older than most of those of Greek or Latin or German. It is easier, for example, to see the resemblance between the English word brother and the Sanskrit bhrātar-than between brother and frāter. But what is even more important, Sanskrit preserves an unusually full system of declensions and conjugations by which it became clear that the inflections of
these languages could likewise be traced to a common origin. Compare the following forms of the verb to be:

 

The Sanskrit forms particularly permit us to see that at one time this verb had the same endings (mi, si, ti, mas, tha, nti) as were employed in the present tense of other verbs, for example:

The material offered by Sanskrit for comparison with the other languages of the group, both in matters of vocabulary and inflection, was thus of the greatest importance. When we add that Hindu grammarians had already gone far in the analysis of the language, had recognized the roots, classified the formative elements, and worked out the rules according to which certain sound-changes occurred, we shall appreciate the extent to which the discovery of Sanskrit contributed to the recognition and determination of the relation that exists among the languages to which it was allied.

Dialectal Differentiation

As previously remarked, where constant communication takes place among the people
speaking a language, individual differences become merged in the general speech of the
community, and a certain conformity prevails. But if any separation of one community
from another takes place and lasts for a considerable length of time, differences grow up between them. The differences may be slight if the separation is slight, and we have merely local dialects. On the other hand, they may become so considerable as to render the language of one district unintelligible to the speakers of another. In this case we generally have the development of separate languages. Even where the differentiation has gone so far, however, it is usually possible to recognize a sufficient number of features which the resulting languages still retain in common to indicate that at one time they were one. It is easy to perceive a close kinship between English and German. Milch and milk, brot and bread, fleisch and flesh, wasser and water are obviously only words that have diverged from a common form. In the same way a connection between Latin and English is indicated by such correspondences as pater with English father, or frāter with brother, although the difference in the initial consonants tends somewhat to obscure the relationship. When we notice that father corresponds to Dutch vader, Gothic fadar, Old Norse faðir, German vater, Greek patēr, Sanskrit pitar-, and Old Irish athir (with loss of the initial consonant), or that English brother corresponds to Dutch broeder, German bruder, Greek phrātēr, Sanskrit bhrātar-, Old Slavic bratŭ, Irish brathair, we are led to the hypothesis that the languages of a large part of Europe and part of Asia were at one time identical.

Language Constantly Changing

In the mind of the average person language is associated with writing and calls up a picture of the printed page. From Latin or French as we meet it in literature we get an impression of something uniform and relatively fixed. We are likely to forget that writing is only a conventional device for recording sounds and that language is primarily speech. Even more important, we tend to forget that the Latin of Cicero or the French of Voltaire is the product of centuries of development and that language as long as it lives and is in actual use is in a constant state of change.

Speech is the product of certain muscular movements. The sounds of language are produced by the passage of a current of air through cavities of the throat and face controlled by the muscles of these regions. Any voluntary muscular movement when constantly repeated is subject to gradual alteration. This is as true of the movements of the organs of speech as of any other parts of the body, and the fact that this alteration takes place largely without our being conscious of it does not change the fact or lessen its effects. Now any alteration in the position or action of the organs of speech results in a difference in the sound produced. Thus each individual is constantly and quite unconsciously introducing slight changes in his or her speech. There is no such thing as uniformity in language. Not only does the speech of one community differ from that of another, but the speech of different individuals of a single community, even different members of the same family, also is marked by individual peculiarities. Members of a group, however, are influenced by one another, and there is a general similarity in the speech of a given community at any particular time. The language of any district or even country is only the sum total of the individual speech habits of those composing it and is subject to such changes as occur in the speech of its members, so far as the changes become general or at least common to a large part of it.

Although the alteration that is constantly going on in language is for the most part gradual and of such nature as often to escape the notice of those in whose speech it is taking place, after a period of time the differences that grow up become appreciable. If we go back to the eighteenth century we find Alexander Pope writing

Good-nature and good-sense must even join;
To err is human, to forgive, divine….

where it is apparent that he pronounced join as jine. Again he writes 

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes Tea.

It is demonstrable that he pronounced tea as tay. Elsewhere he rhymes full—rule; give— believe; glass—place; ear—repair; lost—boast; thought—fault; obliged—besieged; reserve—starve. Since Pope’s time the pronunciation of at least one in each of these pairs has changed so that they are no longer considered good rhymes. If we go back to Chaucer, or still further, to King Alfred (871–899), we find still greater differences. King Alfred said bān (bone), hū (how), hēah (high); in fact all the long vowels of his pronunciation have undergone such change as to make the words in which they occur scarcely recognizable to the typical English-speaking person today.

Liabilities

The three features just described are undoubtedly of great advantage in facilitating the acquisition of English by non-native speakers. On the other hand, it is equally important to recognize the difficulties that the foreign student encounters in learning our language. One of these difficulties is the result of that very simplification of inflections which we have considered among the assets of English. It is the difficulty, of which foreigners often complain, of expressing themselves not only logically, but also idiomatically. An idiom is a form of expression peculiar to one language, and English is not alone in possessing such individual forms of expression. All languages have their special ways of saying things. Thus a German says was für ein Mann (what for a man) whereas in English we say what kind of man; the French say il fait froid (it makes cold) whereas we say it is cold. The mastery of idioms depends largely on memory. The distinction between My husband isn’t up yet and My husband isn’t down yet or the quite contradictory use of the word fast in go fast and stand fast seems to the foreigner to be without reasonable justification. It is doubtful whether such idiomatic expressions are so much more common in English than in other languages—for example, French—as those learning English believe, but they undoubtedly loom large in the minds of nonnative speakers.

A more serious criticism of English by those attempting to master it is the chaotic character of its spelling and the frequent lack of correlation between spelling and pronunciation. Writing is merely a mechanical means of recording speech. And theoretically the most adequate system of spelling is that which best combines simplicity with consistency. In alphabetic writing an ideal system would be one in which the same sound was regularly represented by the same character and a given character always represented the same sound. None of the European languages fully attains this high ideal, although many of them, such as Italian or German, come far nearer to it than English. In English the vowel sound in believe, receive, leave, machine, be, see, is in each case represented by a different spelling. Conversely the symbol a in father, hate, hat, and many other words has nearly a score of values. The situation is even more confusing in our treatment of the consonants. We have a dozen spellings for the sound of sh: shoe, sugar, issue, nation, suspicion, ocean, nauseous, conscious, chaperon, schist, fuchsia, pshaw. This is an extreme case, but there are many others only less disturbing, and it serves to show how far we are at times from approaching the ideal of simplicity and consistency.

We shall consider in another place the causes that have brought about this diversity. We are concerned here only with the fact that one cannot tell how to spell an English word by its pronunciation or how to pronounce it by its spelling. English-speaking children undoubtedly waste much valuable time during the early years of their education in learning to spell their own language, and to the foreigner our spelling is appallingly difficult. To be sure, it is not without its defenders. There are those who emphasize the useful way in which the spelling of an English word often indicates its etymology. Again, a distinguished French scholar has urged that since we have preserved in thousands of borrowed words the spelling that those words have in their original language, the foreigner is thereby enabled more easily to recognize the word. It has been further suggested that the very looseness of our orthography makes less noticeable in the written language the dialectal differences that would be revealed if the various parts of the English-speaking world attempted a more phonetic notation on the basis of their local pronunciation. And some phonologists have argued that this looseness permits an economy in representing words that contain predictable phonological alternants of the same morphemes (e.g., divine~divinity, crime~criminal). But in spite of these considerations, each of which is open to serious criticism, it seems as though some improvement might be effected without sacrificing completely the advantages claimed. That such improvement has often been felt to be desirable is evident from the number of occasions on which attempts at reform have been made. In the early part of the twentieth century a movement was launched, later supported by Theodore Roosevelt and other influential people, to bring about a moderate degree of simplification (see § 231). It was suggested that since we wrote has and had we could just as well write hav instead of have, and in the same way ar and wer since we wrote is and was. But though logically sound, these spellings seemed strange to the eye, and the advantage to be gained from the proposed simplifications was not sufficient to overcome human conservatism or indifference or force of habit. It remains to be seen whether the extension of English in the future will some day compel us to consider the reform of our spelling from an impersonal and, indeed, international point of view. For the present, at least, we do not seem to be ready for simplified spelling.

Natural Gender

English differs from all other major European languages in having adopted natural (rather than grammatical) gender. In studying other European languages the student must learn both the meaning of every noun and also its gender. In the Romance languages, for example, there are only two genders, and all nouns that would be neuter in English are there either masculine or feminine. Some help in these languages is afforded by distinctive endings that at times characterize the two classes. But even this aid is lacking in the Germanic languages, where the distribution of the three genders appears to the English student to be quite arbitrary. Thus in German sonne (sun) is feminine, mond (moon) is masculine, but kind (child), mädchen (maiden), and weib (wife) are neuter. The distinction must be constantly kept in mind, since it not only affects the reference of pronouns but also determines the form of inflection and the agreement of adjectives. In the English language all this was stripped away during the Middle English period, and today the gender of every noun in the dictionary is known instantly. Gender in.

English is determined by meaning. All nouns naming living creatures are masculine or feminine according to the sex of the individual, and all other nouns are neuter.

Inflectional Simplicity

A second feature that English possesses to a preeminent degree is inflectional simplicity. Within the Indo-European family of languages, it happens that the oldest, classical languages—Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin—have inflections of the noun, the adjective, the verb, and to some extent the pronoun that are no longer found in modern languages such as Russian or French or German. In this process of simplifying inflections English has gone further than any other language in Europe. Inflections in the noun as spoken have been reduced to a sign of the plural and a form for the possessive case. The elaborate Germanic inflection of the adjective has been completely eliminated except for the simple indication of the comparative and the superlative degrees. The verb has been simplified by the loss of practically all the personal endings, the almost complete abandonment of any distinction between the singular and the plural, and the gradual discard of the subjunctive mood. The complicated agreements that make German difficult for the nonnative speaker are absent from English.
 

It must not be thought that these developments represent a decay of grammar on the one hand or a Darwinian evolution toward progress, simplicity, and efficiency on the other. From the view of a child learning a first language, these apparent differences in complexity seem to matter not at all. As Hans H. Hock and Brian D.Joseph put it, “the speakers of languages such as English are quite happy without all those case endings, while speakers of modern ‘case-rich’ language such as Finnish or Turkish are just as happy with them.”

However, it is worth trying to specify, as ongoing research in second language acquisition is doing, those features that facilitate or complicate the learning of English by adult speakers of various languages. To the extent that the simplification of English inflections does not cause complications elsewhere in the syntax, it makes the task easier for those learning English as a foreign language.

Cosmopolitan Vocabulary

One of the most obvious characteristics of Present-day English is the size and mixed character of its vocabulary. English is classified as a Germanic language. That is to say, it belongs to the group of languages to which German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian also belong. It shares with these languages similar grammatical structure and many common words. On the other hand, more than half of its vocabulary is derived from Latin. Some of these borrowings have been direct, a great many through French, some through the other Romance languages. As a result, English also shares a great number of words with those languages of Europe that are derived from Latin, notably French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. All of this means that English presents a somewhat familiar appearance to anyone who speaks either a Germanic or a Romance language. There are parts of the language which one feels one does not have to learn, or learns with little effort. To a lesser extent the English vocabulary contains borrowings from many other languages. Instead of making new words chiefly by the combination of existing elements, as German does, English has shown a marked tendency to go outside its own linguistic resources and borrow from other languages. In the course of centuries of this practice English has built up an unusual capacity for assimilating outside elements. We do not feel that there is anything “foreign” about the words chipmunk, hominy, moose, raccoon, and skunk, all of which we have borrowed from the Native American. We are not conscious that the words brandy, cruller, landscape, measles, uproar, and wagon are from Dutch. And so with many other words in daily use. From Italian come balcony, canto, duet, granite, opera, piano, umbrella, volcano; from Spanish, alligator, cargo, contraband, cork, hammock, mosquito, sherry, stampede, tornado, vanilla; from Greek, directly or indirectly, acme, acrobat, anthology, barometer, catarrh, catastrophe, chronology, elastic, magic, tactics, tantalize, and a host of others; from Russian, steppe, vodka, ruble, troika, glasnost, perestroika; from Persian, caravan, dervish, divan, khaki, mogul, shawl, sherbet, and ultimately from Persian jasmine, paradise, check, chess, lemon, lilac, turban, borax, and possibly spinach. A few minutes spent in the examination of any good etymological dictionary will show that English has borrowed from Hebrew and Arabic, Hungarian, Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Malay, Chinese, the languages of Java, Australia, Tahiti, Polynesia, West Africa, and from one of the aboriginal languages of Brazil. And it has assimilated these heterogeneous elements so successfully that only the professional student of language is aware of their origin. Studies of vocabulary acquisition in second language learning support the impression that many students have had in studying a foreign language: Despite problems with faux amis—those words that have different meanings in two different languages—cognates generally are learned more rapidly and retained longer than words that are unrelated towords in the native language lexicon. The cosmopolitan vocabulary of English with its cognates in many languages is an undoubted asset.

Assets and Liabilities

Because English occupies such a prominent place in international communication, it is worth pausing to consider some of the features that figure prominently in learning English as a foreign language. Depending on many variables in the background of the learner, some of these features may facilitate the learning of English, and others may make the effort more difficult. All languages are adequate for the needs of their culture, and we may assume without argument that English shares with the other major languages of Europe the ability to express the multiplicity of ideas and the refinements of thought that demand expression in our modern civilization. The question is rather one of simplicity. How readily can English be learned by the non-native speaker? Does it possess characteristics of vocabulary and grammar that render it easy or difftcult to acquire? To attain a completely objective view of one’s own language is no simple matter. It is easy to assume that what we in infancy acquired without sensible difficulty will seem equally simple to those attempting to learn it in maturity. For most of us, learning any second language requires some effort, and some languages seem harder than others. The most obvious point to remember is that among the many variables in the difficulty of learning a language as an adult, perhaps the most important is the closeness of the speaker’s native language to the language that is being learned. All else equal, including the linguistic skill of the individual learner, English will seem easier to a native speaker of Dutch than to a native speaker of Korean.

Linguists are far from certain how to measure complexity in a language. Even after individual features have been recognized as relatively easy or difficult to learn, the weighting of these features within a single language varies according to the theoretical framework assumed. In an influential modern theory of language, the determination of the difficulty of specific linguistic structures falls within the study of “markedness,” which in turn is an important part of “universal grammar,” the abstract linguistic principles that are innate for all humans. By this view, the grammar of a language consists of a “core,” the general principles of the grammar, and a “periphery,” the more marked structures that result from historical development, borrowing, and other processes that produce “parameters” with different values in different languages.

 

One may think that the loss of many inflections in English, as discussed in $ 10, simplifies the language and makes it easier for the learner. However, if a result of the loss of inflections is an increase in the markedness of larger syntactic structures, then it is uncertain whether the net result increases or decreases complexity.

It is important to emphasize that none of the features that we are considering here has had anything to do with bringing about the prominence of English as a global language. The ethnographic, political, economic, technological, scientific, and cultural forces discussed above have determined the international status of English, which would be the same even if the language had had a much smaller lexicon and eight inflectional cases for nouns, as Indo-European did. The inflections of Latin did nothing to slow its spread when the Roman legions made it the world language that it was for several centuries.

English as a World Language

That the world is fully alive to the need for an international language is evident from the number of attempts that have been made to supply that need artificially. Between 1880 and 1907 fifty-three universal languages were proposed. Some of these enjoyed an amazing, if temporary, vogue. In 1889 Volapük claimed nearly a million adherents. Today it is all but forgotten. A few years later Esperanto experienced a similar vogue, but interest in it now is kept alive largely by local groups and organizations. Apparently the need has not been filled by any of the laboratory products so far created to fill it. And it is doubtful if it ever can be filled in this way. An artificial language might serve some of the requirements of business and travel, but no one has proved willing to make it the medium of political, historical, or scientific thought, to say nothing of literature.

The history of language policy in the twentieth century makes it unlikely that any government will turn its resources to an international linguistic solution that benefits the particular country only indirectly. Without the support of governments and the educational institutions that they control, the establishment of an artificial language for the world will be impossible. Recent history has shown language policy continuing to be a highly emotional issue, the language of a country often symbolizing its independence and nationalism.

The emotions that militate against the establishment of an artificial language work even more strongly against the establishment of a single foreign language for international communication. The official languages of the United Nations are English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. Since it is not to be expected that the speakers of any of these six languages will be willing to subordinate their own language to any of the other five, the question is rather which languages will likely gain ascendancy in the natural course of events. Two centuries ago French would have appeared to have attained an undisputed claim to such ascendancy. It was then widely cultivated throughout Europe as the language of polite society, it was the diplomatic language of the world, and it enjoyed considerable popularity in literary and scientific circles. During the nineteenth century its prestige, though still great, gradually declined. The prominence of Germany in all fields of scientific and scholarly activity made German a serious competitor. Now more scientific research is probably published in English than in any other language, and the preeminence of English in commercial use is undoubted. The revolution in communications during the twentieth century has contributed to the spread of several European languages, but especially of English because of major broadcasting and motion picture industries in the United States and Great Britain. It will be the combined effect of economic and cultural forces such as these, rather than explicit legislation by national or international bodies, that will determine the world languages of the future.
Since World War II, English as an official language has claimed progressively less territory among the former colonies of the British Empire while its actual importance and number of speakers have increased rapidly.

At the time of the first edition of this history (1935), English was the official language of one-fourth of the earth’s surface, even if only a small fraction of the population in parts of that area actually knew English. As the colonies gained independence, English continued to be used alongside the vernaculars. In many of the new countries English is either the primary language or a necessary second language in the schools, the courts, and business. The extent of its use varies with regional history and current government policy, although stated policy often masks the actual complexities. In Uganda, for example, where no language is spoken as a first language by more than 16 percent of the population, English is the one official language; yet less than one percent of the population speaks it as a first language. In India, English was to serve transitional purposes only until 1965, but it continues to be used officially with Hindi and fourteen other national languages. In Tanzania, Swahili is the one official language, but English is still indispensable in the schools and the high courts. It is nowhere a question of substituting English for the native speech. Nothing is a matter of greater patriotic feeling than the mother tongue. The question simply concerns the use of English, or some other widely known idiom, for inter-national communication. Braj B.Kachru notes that it is a clear fact of history that English is in a position of unprecedented power: “Where over 650 artificial languages have failed, English has succeeded; where many other natural languages with political and economic power to back them up have failed, English has succeeded. One reason for this dominance of English is its propensity for acquiring new identities, its power of assimilation, its adaptability for ‘decolonization’ as a language, its manifestation in a range of varieties, and above all its suitability as a flexible medium for literary and other types of creativity across languages and cultures.” and other languages of the world are richer or poorer because of “the global power and hegemony of English,” and he called for a full discussion of the question.

Recent awareness of “endangered languages” and a new sensitivity to ecolinguistics have made clear that the success of English brings problems in its wake. The world is poorer when a language dies on average every two weeks. For native speakers of English as well, the status of the English language can be a mixed blessing, especially if the great majority of English speakers remain monolingual. Despite the dominance of English in the European Union, a British candidate for an international position may be at a disadvantage compared with a young EU citizen from Bonn or Milan or Lyon who is nearly fluent in English. Referring to International English as “Global,” one observer writes: “The emergence of Global is not an unqualified bonus for the British… for while we have relatively easy access to Global, so too do well-educated mainland Europeans, who have other linguistic assets besides.”

A similarly mixed story complicates any assessment of English in the burgeoning field  of information technology. During the 1990s the explosive growth of the Internet was extending English as a world language in ways that could not have been foreseen only a few years earlier. The development of the technology and software to run the Internet took place in the United States, originally as ARPANET (the Advanced Research Project Agency Network), a communication system begun in 1969 by the U.S. Department of Defense in conjunction with military contractors and universities. In 2000 English was the dominant language of the Internet, with more than half of the Internet hosts located in the United States and as many as three-fourths in the United States and other Englishspeaking countries. The protocols by which ASCII code was transmitted were developed for the English alphabet, and the writing systems for languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean presented formidable problems for use on the World Wide Web. The technology that made knowledge of English essential also facilitated online Englishlanguage instruction in countries such as China, where demand for English exceeds the available teachers. However, changes in the Internet economy are so rapid that it is impossible to predict the future of English relative to other languages in this global system. It is increasingly clear that online shoppers around the world prefer to use the Internet in their own language and that English-language sites in the United States have lost market share to local sites in other countries. In September 2000 Bill Gates predicted that English would be the language of the Web for the next ten years because accurate computerized translation would be more than a decade away. Yet four months later China announced the world’s first Chinese-English Internet browser with a reported translation accuracy of 80 percent.

by Albert C. Baugh & Thomas Cable

The Future of the English Language

The extent and importance of the English language today make it reasonable to ask whether we cannot speculate as to the probable position it will occupy in the future. It is admittedly hazardous to predict the future of nations; the changes during the present century in the politics and populations of the developing countries have confounded predictions of fifty years ago. Since growth in a language is primarily a matter of population, the most important question to ask is which populations of the world will increase most rapidly. Growth of population is determined by the difference between the birth rate and the death rate and by international migration. The single most important fact about current trends is that the Third World countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have experienced a sharp drop in mortality during the twentieth century without a corresponding drop in the birth rate. As a result, the population of these areas is younger and growing faster than the population of the industrialized countries of Europe and North America. The effect of economic development upon falling growth rates is especially clear in Asia, where Japan is growing at a rate only slightly higher than that of Europe, while southern Asia—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh—is growing at a rate more than twice as high. China is growing at a moderate rate, between that of Europe and southern Asia, but with a population in excess of one billion, the absolute increase will be very high. According to a recent United Nations analysis, by 2050 the United 

States will be the only developed country among the world’s twenty most populous nations, whereas in 1950 at least half of the top ten were industrial nations. The population of the less developed countries is expected to grow from 4.9 billion in 2000 to 8.2 billion in 2050, while the more developed countries will hold at 1.2 billion.

 India is expected to replace China as the world’s most populous nation in half a century, with a concomitant growth in Hindi and Bengali, already among the top five languages in the world. The one demographic fact that can be stated with certainty is that the proportion of the world’s population in the economically developed countries will shrink during the next half century in comparison with the proportion in the presently developing countries. Since most of the native speakers of English live in the developed countries, it can be expected that this group will account for a progressively smaller proportion of the world’s population. Counteracting the general trend somewhat is the exceptional situation in the United States, the only country among the more developed ones that is growing at slightly more than a replacement rate instead of actually declining.

If the future of a language were merely a matter of the number who speak it as a first language, English would appear to be entering a period of decline after four centuries of unprecedented expansion. What makes this prospect unlikely is the fact that English is widely used as a second language and as a foreign language throughout the world. The number of speakers who have acquired English as a second language with near native fluency is estimated to be between 350 and 400 million. If we add to first and second language speakers those who know enough English to use it more or less effectively as a foreign language, the estimates for the total number of speakers range between one and one and a half billion. In some of the developing countries that are experiencing the greatest growth, English is one of the official languages, as it is in India, Nigeria, and the Philippines. The situation is complex because of widely varying government policies that are subject to change and that often do not reflect the actual facts (see § 229). Although there are concerted efforts to establish the vernaculars in a number of countries—Hindi in India, Swahili in Tanzania, Tagalog in the Philippines—considerable forces run counter to these efforts and impede the establishment of national languages. In some countries English is a neutral language among competing indigenous languages, the establishment of any one of which would arouse ethnic jealousies. In most developing countries communications in English are superior to those in the vernacular languages. The unavailability of textbooks in Swahili has slowed the effort to establish that language as the language of education in Tanzania. Yet textbooks and other publications are readily available in English, and they are produced by countries with the economic means to sustain their vast systems of communications.

The complex interaction of these forces defies general statements of the present situation or specific projections into the distant future. Among European languages it seems likely that English, German, and Spanish will benefit from various developments. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the increasing political and economic unification of Western Europe are already resulting in the shifting fortunes of Russian and German. The independent states of the former Soviet Union are unlikely to continue efforts to make Russian a common language throughout that vast region, and the presence of a unified Germany will reinforce the importance of the German language, which already figures prominently as a language of commerce in the countries of Eastern Europe. The growth of Spanish, as of Portuguese, will come mainly from the rapidly increasing population of Latin America, while the growth in English will be most notable in its use throughout the world as a second language. It is also likely that pidgin and creole varieties of English will become increasingly widespread in those areas where English is not a first language.

The Importance of English

In numbers of speakers as well as in its uses for international communication and in other less quantifiable measures, English is one of the most important languages of the world. Spoken by more than 380 million people in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the former British Empire, it is the largest of the Western languages. English, however, is not the most widely used native language in the world. Chinese, in its eight spoken varieties, is known to 1.3 billion people in China alone. Some of the European languages are comparable to English in reflecting the forces of history, especially with regard to European expansion since the sixteenth century. Spanish, next in size to English, is spoken by about 330 million people, Portuguese by 180 million, Russian by 175 million, German by 110 million, French by 80 million native speakers (and a large number of second-language speakers), Italian by 65 million. A language may be important as a lingua franca in a country or region whose diverse populations would otherwise be unable to communicate. This is especially true in the former colonies of England and France whose colonial languages have remained indispensable even after independence and often in spite of outright hostility to the political and cultural values that the European languages represent.

French and English are both languages of wider communication, and yet the changing positions of the two languages in international affairs during the past century illustrate the extent to which the status of a language depends on extralinguistic factors. It has been said that English is recurringly associated with practical and powerful pursuits. Joshua A.Fishman writes: “In the Third World (excluding former anglophone and francophone colonies) French is considered more suitable than English for only one function: opera. It is considered the equal of English for reading good novels or poetry and for personal prayer (the local integrative language being widely viewed as superior to both English and French in this connection). But outside the realm of aesthetics, the Ugly Duckling reigns supreme.”

The ascendancy of English as measured by numbers of speakers in various activities does not depend on nostalgic attitudes toward the originally Englishspeaking people or toward the language itself. Fishman makes the point that English is less loved but more used; French is more loved but less used. And in a world where “econo-technical superiority” is what counts, “the real ‘powerhouse’ is still English. It doesn’t have to worry about being loved because, loved or not, it works. It makes the world go round, and few indeed can afford to ‘knock it.’”

 If “econo-technical superiority” is what counts, we might wonder about the relative status of English and Japanese. Although spoken by 125 million people in Japan, a country that has risen to economic and technical dominance since World War II, the Japanese language has yet few of the roles in international affairs that are played by English or French. The reasons are rooted in the histories of these languages. Natural languages are not like programming languages such as Fortran or LISP, which have gained or lost international currency over a period of a decade or two. Japan went through a two-century period of isolation from the West (between 1640 and 1854) during which time several European languages were establishing the base of their subsequent expansion.

The Importance of a Language

It is natural for people to view their own first language as having intrinsic advantages over languages that are foreign to them. However, a scientific approach to linguistic study combined with a consideration of history reminds us that no language acquires importance because of what are assumed to be purely internal advantages. Languages become important because of events that shape the balance of power among nations. These political, economic, technological, and military events may or may not reflect favorably, in a moral sense, on the peoples and states that are the participants; and certainly different parties to the events will have different interpretations of what is admirable or not. It is clear, however, that the language of a powerful nation will acquire importance as a direct reflection of political, economic, technological, and military strength; so also will the arts and sciences expressed in that language have advantages, including the opportunities for propagation. The spread of arts and sciences through the medium of a particular language in turn reinforces the prestige of that language. Internal deficits such as an inadequate vocabulary for the requirements at hand need not restrict the spread of a language. It is normal for a language to acquire through various means, including borrowing from other languages, the words that it needs. Thus, any language among the 4,000 languages of the world could have attained the position of importance that the half-dozen or so most widely spoken languages have attained if the external conditions had been right. English, French, German, and Spanish are important languages because of the history and influence of their populations in modern times; for this reason they are widely studied outside the country of their use. Sometimes the cultural importance of a nation has at some former time been so great that its language remains important long after it has ceased to represent political, commercial, or other greatness. Greek, for example, is studied in its classical form because of the great civilization preserved and recorded in its literature; but in its modern form as spoken in Greece today the Greek language does not serve as a language of wider communication.

Growth and Decay

Moreover, English, like all other languages, is subject to that constant growth and decay that characterize all forms of life. It is a convenient figure of speech to speak of languages as living and as dead. Although we rarely think of language as something that possesses life apart from the people who speak it, as we can think of plants or of animals, we can observe in speech something like the process of change that characterizes the life of living things. When a language ceases to change, we call it a dead language. Classical Latin is a dead language because it has not changed for nearly 2,000 years. The change that is constantly going on in a living language can be most easily seen in the vocabulary. Old words die out, new words are added, and existing words change their meaning. Much of the vocabulary of Old English has been lost, and the development of new words to meet new conditions is one of the most familiar phenomena of our language. Change of meaning can be illustrated from any page of Shakespeare. Nice in Shakespeare’s day meant foolish; rheumatism signified a cold in the head. Less familiar but no less real is the change of pronunciation. A slow but steady alteration, especially in the vowel sounds, has characterized English throughout its history.

Old English stān has become our stone; cū has become cow. Most of these changes are so regular as to be capable of classification under what are called “sound laws.” Changes likewise occur in the grammatical forms of a language. These may be the result of gradual phonetic modification, or they may result from the desire for uniformity commonly felt where similarity of function or use is involved. The person who says I knowed is only trying to form the past tense of this verb after the pattern of the past tense of so many verbs in English. This process is known as the operation of analogy, and it may affect the sound and meaning as well as the form of words. Thus it will be part of our task to trace the influences that are constantly at work, tending to alter a language from age to age as spoken and written, and that have brought about such an extensive alteration in English as to make the English language of 1000 quite unintelligible to English speakers of 2000.

Influences at Work on Language

The English language of today reflects many centuries of development. The political and social events that have in the course of English history so profoundly affected the English people in their national life have generally had a recognizable effect on their language. The Roman Christianizing of Britain in 597 brought England into contact with Latin civilization and made significant additions to our vocabulary. The Scandinavian invasions resulted in a considerable mixture of the two peoples and their languages.

The Norman Conquest made English for two centuries the language mainly of the lower classes while the nobles and those associated with them used French on almost all occasions. And when English once more regained supremacy as the language of all elements of the population, it was an English greatly changed in both form and vocabulary from what it had been in 1066. In a similar way the Hundred Years’ War, the rise of an important middle class, the Renaissance, the development of England as a maritime power, the expansion of the British Empire, and the growth of commerce and industry, of science and literature, have, each in their way, contributed to the development of the language. References in scholarly and popular works to “Indian English,” “Caribbean English,” “West African English,” and other regional varieties point to the fact that the political and cultural history of the English language is not simply the history of the British Isles and of North America but a truly international history of quite divergent societies, which have caused the language to change and become enriched as it responds to their own special needs.

by Albert C. Baugh & Thomas Cable

The History of the English Language as a Cultural Subject

It was observed by that remarkable twelfth-century chronicler Henry of Huntington that an interest in the past was one of the distinguishing characteristics of humans as compared with the other animals. The medium by which speakers of a language communicate their thoughts and feelings to others, the tool with which they conduct their business or the government of millions of people, the vehicle by which has been transmitted the science, the philosophy, the poetry of the culture is surely worthy of study. It is not to be expected that everyone should be a philologist or should master the technicalities of linguistic science. But it is reasonable to assume that a liberally educated person should know something of the structure of his or her language, its position in the world and its relation to other tongues, the wealth of its vocabulary together with the sources from which that vocabulary has been and is being enriched, and the complex relationships among the many different varieties of speech that are gathered under the single name of the English language. The diversity of cultures that find expression in it is a reminder that the history of English is a story of cultures in contact during the past 1,500 years. It understates matters to say that political, economic, and social forces influence a language. These forces shape the language in every aspect, most obviously in the number and spread of its speakers, and in what is called “the sociology of language,” but also in the meanings of words, in the accents of the spoken language, and even in the structures of the grammar. The history of a language is intimately bound up with the history of the peoples who speak it. The purpose of this book, then, is to treat the history of English not only as being of interest to the specialized student but also as a cultural subject within the view of all educated people, while including enough references to technical matters to make clear the scientific principles involved in linguistic evolution.

by Albert C. Baugh & Thomas Cable