an imperative necessity to study the colloquial dialects. Father Beschi's grammar of Low Tamil and the Telugu grammars by Campbell, Morris, Arden and Brown are instances of the interest which the early workers took in the spoken languages.
Still, it cannot be said that they seriously took to utilizing the local dialects for philological purposes. Dialectal study is a science of later growth and at the present time it is held to be of the highest importance from the philological point of view. The various influences that tend to bring about change in language are found in living activity only in the dialects. Contemporary dialects, are the realities of a language, pulsating with life, whereas the recorded language, much more that of a previous generation, is, at best, an approximate and inadequate representation of the living word, unless it is before us phonetically transcribed and tonically
