As the War for Independence was winding down, the linguistic
future of the United States was up for grabs. After all, the
English of King George III had suddenly become the tongue of the
oppressor. And roughly one-quarter of the new nation's 3 million
citizens were not native English speakers. Some Americans sought
to replace English with German, then spoken by nearly 10% of the
population, and others advocated more radical options, including
right-to-left reading in Hebrew. In 1783, Webster, then a recent
Yale graduate eking out a living as a schoolteacher, put an
immediate end to the charged debate. His rhetorical tool was a
tiny textbook, just 6 1/4 inches long and 3 1/2 inches wide,
which made the case for an American brand of English. In his so-
called blue-backed speller, Webster issued a linguistic
declaration of independence: "This country must, in some future
time, be as distinguished by the superiority of her literary
improvements as she is already by the liberality of her civil
and ecclesiastical co