102 PKINCIPLES OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE. 



ment is thus the procluot of jm infiuity of divergent or dfentrifugal forces. The 

 great centripetal force which hohls them in check, and combines them into a 

 sinc'le direction, is the necessity of communication. Man is no soliloquist, and 

 that would not be language which was understood and employed by one only. 

 Each person is, in his own way, engaged in modifying language, but no one's 

 action sha])es the general speech unless it be accepted by the rest and biecome 

 common usage. Each community must speak alike; Avhatever changes their 

 tongue may undergo must be ratiiieil and adopted by ihem all. 



Communication being thus the force which produces uniformity of speech, it 

 is clear that whatever narrows communication and tends to isolate communities 

 favors separation of a language into dialects ; whatever extends communication 

 and expands the limits of communities, tends to preserve language homoge- 

 neous. When a race is confined within narrow boundaries, however rapidly 

 its tongue may undergo the inevitable processes of change, all will learn from 

 each and each from all, and they will continue to understand one anoth(?r. But 

 if the race grow rapidly in numbers, spi-eading over region after region, and 

 sending out distant colonies, only favoring circumstances and conditions can 

 preserve its unity of speech. In a low state of civilization' a maintenance of 

 the bonds of community over a wide area is impracticable ; the tendency is to 

 clannish feeling, to separation into tribes ; and multiplicity of dialects is the 

 natural consequence. Culture and enlightenment give a wonderful cohesive 

 force; political- unity, national feeling, community of traditions and faith, make 

 strongly in favor of linguistic unity also; a traditional literature helps yet more 

 powerfully to the same result; but, most of all, a written literature, and a sys- 

 tem of popular instruction. The same causes which restrict the variation of 

 language in time, from generation to generation, restrict it also in space, from 

 region to region. Moreover, as community occasions and preserves identity of 

 speech, so it also has power to bring identity out of dissimilarity. The fusion 

 of communities causes the fusion of their forms of speech ; the multiplication 

 and strengthening of the ties which bind together the sections of a people makes 

 for the efi'acement of differences already existing, the assimilation of dialects, and 

 the production of homogeneous language. 



Both classes of influences — those which lead to diversity and those which 

 produce assimilation — are always at work, and a consideration of their joint 

 and mutual action is necessary to the explanation of the history of any lan- 

 guage, or family of langvxages'; but the former are more fundamental and in- 

 separable from linguistic growth ; the latter are more external and incidental, 

 more varying in their mode and scale of operation. Language everywhere 

 tends to diversity, but circumstances connected with its use check, control, and 

 even reverse the tendency. The division of a formerly homogeneous language 

 into dialects has been the rule in human history ; the extinction of dialectic 

 differences, wdielher by the extinction or fusion with others of the peoples em- 

 ploying them, or by extension of the sway of single dialects, has been the ex- 

 ception, connected with the great facts of history, as the spread of empire and 

 civilization under the auspices of certain races. Misled by a too exclusive at- 

 tention to facts of the latter class, one or two modern authors of high rank have 

 been guilty of the paradox of holding that infinite dialectic division is the 

 noi'mal primitive state of language, which tends to coalescence and assimilation. 

 A greater and more pernicious error could hardly be maintained. 



'rhe principles h^"e laid down teach us how we arc to proceed in classifying 

 and arranging the infinity of tongues now prevailing on the earth. Many of 

 them, at least, are the divergent branches of more original stocks. Languages 

 arc to be grouped by their affinities : we are to rank together first those which 



