In 1894, m e Danish linguist Otto Jespersen published a work entitled Progress in Language in which all that is linguistically desirable is judged to be best represented not by ancient Sanskrit but by modern English. The book is a revised version of the doctoral dissertation Jespersen had submitted just three years earlier to the University of Copenhagen, and from its opening pages it is evident that European linguistics, from the time of Schleicher some thirty years before, has undergone a series of what may seem surprising reversals. Jespersen's very title, as Aarsleff notes, is a more or less explicit critique of the romantic view that the history of language exhibits decay rather than progress (From Locke, 296).

By the 1890s, in fact, its assumptions having come under greater critical scrutiny, the hegemony of German romantic linguistics seems largely to have broken apart, making way for the emergence of new perspectives in the study of language. Accordingly, in the work of such writers as Jespersen, Michel Bréal, and Ferdinand de Saussure, language ceases to be regarded as a natural or aesthetic object, autonomous in its development and essentially closed to all human influence. Instead, it increasingly takes on the character of a social institution, whose value consists not in the beauty of its intrinsic form or in its power to stimulate intellectual activity or cultural growth, but in its efficiency as a communicative system, an efficiency governed precisely by the changing needs and constant influence of its speakers.