Pomona: The Future of English

Before discussing the future of English, one is forced, in the bustle of these scientific days, to inquire whether language itself has a future. “We are working”, wrote Mr. J. B. S. Haldane, in his brilliant little essay Daedalus, “towards a condition when any two persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another in not more than a twenty-fourth of a second.” Is speech quick-moving enough to keep a place in such a picture? When everything else has learned the speed of lightning, will the transference of our thought be likely to lag behind and is it not a waste of time to ask if future generations will speak German, or Japanese, or Esperanto, when they may not need to speak at all?

Scientific knowledge is a delightful plaything. Working with measurable quantities, it can treat the future like a ball of string to be unwound. Though life is all wonder and surprise, though the world always turns out stranger and richer than we expected, we know that the future will be linked mechanically with the present as the present is with the past. The machinery of human existence fifty years hence will be the practical application of possibilities known to-day. There is basis, then, for a certain kind of scientific prediction. The future of language is in a different case, because the mechanical element in it is subsidiary. It is conjecturable, of course, that it may one day be superseded, that men may learn to transfuse their meanings by a kind of controlled telepathy, mind meeting mind. But to do this they would need to be able to think without words, and language, as we now know it, is not for communication only: it is the very framework of our thought. It is part of our lives; and what our lives are to be we can tell only by living them.

A good deal has been learned of late about the evolution of language—enough to modify very much our views as to the influences that really count, the habits which conduce to accuracy or to vitality. But there is a long way between understanding after the event and understanding before it. It is with the different languages of the world as with the different species of animals: once they have come into being, one easily sees which way they came, one cannot see in the least which way they are going. Of all whom change awaits, man seems likely to change most and most quickly. Whole nations are stirred to hope and restlessness. Never did the future beckon more enticingly than it does now. Science lays a finger upon the springs of life and dreams of a race to be made perfect, not by the murderous processes of haphazard struggle, but by the swift and decisive elaboration of a conscious design. The man of the future, we hear, may differ as much from ourselves as we do from monkeys. Inventive eugenics, new as motor-cars, is to inaugurate a still more drastic revolution and make of us, in the near future, whatever we may wish to be.