ABSTRACT
Published in the year before the Great Exhibition, Watts' essay is marked by the confidence of the period. Ranging over both past and contemporary pretenders to the title of universal language, Watts expresses a sanguinity and pride in the English language which is typical of the new discipline of 'the history of the language' to which this piece is a contribution. Universal language schemes have a long history, from Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) to Basic and Esperanto in this century. However, the concern in this essay is not with projects for artificial languages which are intended for universal use, but with natural languages which, by dint of the fact that they are used all over the globe, have become universal in that sense. Watts notes that the last language to achieve such status was Latin, which was of course the language of the Catholic church and therefore for an extensive period the language of the European intelligentsia. The rise of the vernacular languages in the wake of the Reformation, however, coupled with the development of print-capitalism, brought about the end of such dominance and universality. Thus although Hobbes was famous in Europe on account of his use of Latin in the seventeenth century, his successor in the English philosophical tradition John Locke not only wrote in English but composed a treatise on education in which he argued that it, rather than Latin, should be the medium of instruction for the young.
