them of old time; by the possession of a traditional literature; but, most of all, by a recorded literature, the habit of writing, and a system of instruction. Culture and education are the most powerful of all the forces which oppose linguistic change. The smallest conceivable alterative influence will emanate from one who has been trained to speak correctly by a conscious effort, and who is accustomed to write what he says almost as frequently and naturally as he speaks it. Words, in their true form and independent entity, are too distinctly present to his mind for him to take part either in their fusion or mutilation. Hence the effect of literary culture is to fix a language in the condition in which it happens to be found, to assure to it the continued possession of the formative processes which are then active in its development, but to check or altogether prevent its acquisition of any others; to turn its prevailing habits into unalterable laws; and to maintain its phonetic character against anything but the most gradual and insidious change.
Thus far in the history of the world, this kind of conservative influence has usually been active only within the limits of a class; a learned or priestly caste has become the guardian of the national literature and the conservator of the tongue in which it was written; while to the masses of the people both have grown strange and unfamiliar. Deprived of the popular support, the cultivated dialect has at once begun to lose its vitality; for no language can remain alive which is not answering all the infinitely varied needs of a whole community, and adapting itself in every part to their changes; it is stinted of its natural and necessary growth when it is divorced from general use and made the exclusive property of a class. Thus there come to exist among the same people two separate tongues; the one an inheritance from the past, becoming ever more stiff and constrained, and employable only for special uses; the other the production of the present, growing constantly more unlike the other by the operation of the ordinary processes of linguistic change; full of inaccuracies and corruptions, if we choose to call them so, but also full of a healthy and vigorous life, which enables it finally to overthrow and replace the learned
