The English-Speaking Race.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 51, 25 August 1894, Page 3

The English-Speaking Race.

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 (writes Mr Grant Allen), in point of vitahty, comes Spanish, which is swallowing up the overflow of French, Italian, and other Latin races. Third, perhaps' ranks Russian, destined to become in time the spoken tongue of a vast fcracfc in Northern and central Asia. Among nonEaropean 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 Englisb■peaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomeration of all nationalities, will control between them the destines of mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern hemisphere. Russia will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay, and Arabic will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa and the East. But French, German, and Italan will be insignificant and dwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish or Danish in our own day. — "Post Prandial Philosophy," by Grant Allen.