The population of the United States was then but little more than 5,000,000, but in twenty years it had nearly doubled, and thereafter it increased steadily and enormously, until by 1860 it had become greater than that of the United Kingdom. Since that time the majority of English-speaking persons in the world have lived on this side of the water; today there are nearly three times as many here as in the United Kingdom and nearly twice as many as in the whole British Empire. This enormous increase in the American population, beginning with the great immigrations of the 30's and 40's, quickly lifted English to fourth place among the languages, and then to third, to second and to first. When it took the lead the attention of philologists was actively directed to the matter, and in 1868 one of them, a German named Brackebusch, first seriously raised the question whether English was destined to obliterate certain of the older tongues.[1] Brackebusch decided against it on various philological grounds, none of them particularly sound. His own figures, as the following table from his dissertation shows,[2] were rather against him:
| English | 60,000,000 |
| German | 52,000,000 |
| Russian | 45,000,000 |
| French | 45,000,000 |
| Spanish | 40,000,000 |
This is 1868. Before another generation had passed the lead of English, still because of the great growth of the United States, had become yet more impressive, as the following figures for 1890 show:
| English | 111,100,000 |
| German | 75,200,000 |
| Russian | 75,000,000 |
- ↑ Long before this the general question of the relative superiority of various languages had been debated in Germany. In 1796 the Berlin Academy offered a prize for the best essay on The Ideal of a Perfect Language. It was won by one Jenisch with a treatise bearing the sonorous title of A Philosophical-Critical Comparison and Estimate of Fourteen of the Ancient and Modern Languages of Europe, viz., Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian and Lithuanian.
- ↑ Is English Destined to Become the Universal Language? by W. Brackebusch; Göttingen, 1868.
