Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429: Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852Various
History
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429: Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852
Various
Periodicals
The extension of the English language over the civilised world is a
curiosity of the age. French, German, Italian, and other continental
tongues, seem to have attained their limits as vernaculars. Each is
spoken in its own country, and by a few fashionables and scholars
beyond. But the language which pushes abroad is the English; and it
may be said to be rooting out colonised French and Spanish, and
becoming almost everywhere, beyond continental Europe, the spoken and
written tongue. Long the Spanish enjoyed the supremacy in Central
America; but it has followed the fate of the idle, proud, combative,
and good-for-nothing people who carried it across the Atlantic, and is
disappearing like snow before the sun of a genial spring. The sooner
it is extinct the better. Already the English is the vernacular from
the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific, wherever civilised
settlements are formed. As large a population now speaks this nervous
language in America as in Great Britain; and this is only an
indication of its progress. By means of a rapidly-increasing
population, the English language will in twenty years be spoken by
upwards of fifty million Americans; and if to these we add all within
the home and colonial dominion, the number speaking it at that period
will not be short of a hundred millions. What an amount of
letter-writing and printing will this produce! And, after all, how
small that amount in comparison with what will be seen a hundred years
hence, when many hundred millions of men are on the earth, English in
speech and feeling, whatever may be their local and political
distinctions! The gratification which one experiences in contemplating
facts of this kind, transcends the power of language. To all
appearance, our English tongue is the expression of civil and
religious freedom--in fact, of common sense; and its spread over the
globe surely indicates the progress of civilised habits and
institutions.
In referring to the qualities which are usually found in connection
with the prevalence of English as a vernacular, we are led to
anticipate prodigious strides in the popularising of literature during
the next twenty years. What, also, may we not expect to see done for
the extension of epistolary correspondence? Intercourse by letter has
advanced only one step of its progress, by the system of inland
penny-postage. Another step remains to be effected: the system of
carrying letters oversea on the same easy terms. That this Ocean
Penny-Postage, as it is termed, will be carried out, at least as
regards the larger British colonies, within a period much under twenty
years, is exceedingly probable. When this grand achievement is
accomplished, there will ensue a stream of intercommunication with
distant lands, of which we can at present form no proper conception,
and which will go far towards binding all parts of the earth in a
general bond of brotherhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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