Every element of culture [...] exercises a conservative influence, tending both to preserve the language from change and to preserve its unity throughout the territory it occupies. The rise of a national feeling of so high an order that it reverences the deeds and the words of past generation, and leads to the production of a national literature, is obviously conservative because it amounts to setting up a norm of correct speech, by which men’s mind shall be influenced in judging, for acceptance or rejection, the individual proposals of change.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.158