Here are men who by speech belong to one nation, by
actual descent to another. If they lose the physical characteristics of
the race to which the original settler belonged, it will be due to
intermarriage, to climate, to some cause altogether independent of
language. Every nation will have some adopted children of this kind,
more or fewer; men who belong to it by speech, but who do not belong to
it by race. And what happens in the case of individuals happens in the
case of whole nations. The pages of history are crowded with cases in
which nations have cast aside the tongue of their forefathers, and have
taken instead the tongue of some other people. Greek in the East, Latin
in the West, became the familiar speech of millions who had not a drop
of Greek or Italian blood in their veins. The same has been the case in
later times with Arabic, Persian, Spanish, German, English. Each of
those tongues has become the familiar speech of vast regions where the
mass of the people are not Arabian, Spanish, or English, otherwise than
by adoption. The Briton of Cornwall has, slowly but in the end
thoroughly, adopted the speech of England.
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