A remarkable fact that we too easily take for granted

From E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy.

But these benefits of national literate culture will be lost if we take our cultural traditions and national language too much for granted. It is all too easy for us to make this mistake, because of our history. When our nation began, we did not experience the bloody animosities and social dislocations that followed the imposition of national languages in France, Spain, and Britain, and that are now following the same process in Russia. Fortunately, we inherited a standard written language that by 1776 had become normalized in grammar, spelling, and pronunciation. Our ancient charters, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were written in a language that is current more than two hundred years later - a remarkable fact that we too easily take for granted when we read them. We remain happily unaware of the political struggles that usually accompanied the establishment of a national language. The Scots and Irish and Welsh did not begin to speak English because they believed it to be superior to their own language. The work of standardizing our language had been done for us long ago in such bloody, faraway battles as Flodden, Worcester, and Drogheda and in numerous decades of work by English scholars and schoolmasters.