1. The Struggle For Life Among Languages

A distinguished Positivist friend of mine, who is in most matters a
practical man of the world, astonished me greatly the other day at
Venice, by the grave remark that Italian was destined to be the language
of the future. I found on inquiry he had inherited the notion direct
from Auguste Comte, who justified it on the purely sentimental and
unpractical ground that the tongue of Dante had never yet been
associated with any great national defeat or disgrace. The idea
surprised me not a little; because it displays such a profound
misconception of what language is, and why people use it. The speech of
the world will not be decided on mere grounds of sentiment: the tongue
that survives will not survive because it is so admirably adapted for
the manufacture of rhymes or epigrams. Stern need compels. Frenchmen and
Germans, in congress assembled, and looking about them for a means of
intercommunication, might indeed agree to accept Italian then and there
as an international compromise. But congresses don't make or unmake the
habits of everyday life; and the growth or spread of a language is a
thing as much beyond our deliberate human control as the rise or fall of
the barometer.

My friend's remark, however, set me thinking and watching what are
really the languages now gaining and spreading over the civilised world;
it set me speculating what will be the outcome of this gain and spread
in another half century. And the results are these: Vastly the most
growing and absorbing of all languages at the present moment is the
English, which is almost everywhere swallowing up the overflow of
German, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Russian. Next to it, probably, in point
of vitality, comes Spanish, which is swallowing up the overflow of
French, Italian, and the other Latin races. Third, perhaps, ranks
Russian, destined to become in time the spoken tongue of a vast tract in
Northern and Central Asia. Among non-European languages, three seem to
be gaining fast: Chinese, Malay, Arabic. Of the doomed tongues, on the
other hand, the most hopeless is French, which is losing all round;
while Italian, German, and Dutch are either quite at a standstill or
slightly retrograding. The world is now round. By the middle of the
twentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominant
speech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerate
of all nationalities, will control between them the destinies of
mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern
hemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay,
Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa
and the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant and
dwindling European dialects, as