[…] nothing can make wide unity of speech except extended community; nothing but civilization can make extended community. As, through the ages of recorded history, the power as well as the degree of civilization has been constantly growing, till now it is the predominant force, and the uncivilized races subsist only by the toleration of the civilized […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.176

[…] the influences of barbarism and civilization […] are by no means the only determining influences which quicken or retard the alterative processes. It is the predominant forces of civilization which, by a two-fold action, have kept the language of the two great divisions of English-speakers nearly accordant […] first, by making actual communication between them easier and closer than between two tribes of rude people separated only by a few miles of mountain or of plain, by a forest or a river; indeed, by giving them, as it were, in their common literature, a great body of speakers who are all the time communicating with both; and, in second place, by so restraining the activity of the alterative processes that their results have time to reach and permeate both divisions.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.165-166