dialect, must be determined by the special circumstances of the case. Of the multitudes of Germans whom emigration brings to our shores, some establish themselves together in considerable numbers: they cover with their settlements a tract in the West, or fill a quarter in some of our large towns and cities. They form, then, a kind of community of their own, in the midst of the greater community which surrounds them, having numerous points of contact with the latter, but not absorbed into its structure: there are enough speakers of English among them to furnish all the means of communication with the world about them which they need; they are proud of their German nationality and cling to it; they have their own schools, paper, books, preachers—and their language, though sure to yield finally to the assimilating influences which surround it, may be kept up, possibly, for generations. So also with a crowd of Irish, clustered together in a village or suburb, breeding in and in, deriving their scanty instruction from special schools under priestly care: their characteristic brogue and other peculiarities of word and phrase may have an indefinite lease of life. But, on the other hand, families of foreign nationality scattered in less numbers among us can make no effective resistance to the force which tends to identify them thoroughly with the community of English speakers, and their language is soon given up for ours.
There is evidently no limit to the scale upon which such fusion and assimilation of speech may go on. The same causes which lead an individual, or family, or group of families, to learn and use another tongue than that which they themselves or their fathers have been accustomed to speak, may be by historical circumstances made operative throughout a whole class, or over a whole region. When two communities are combined into one, there comes to be but one language where before there were two. A multiplication and strengthening of the ties which bind together the different sections of one people tends directly toward the effacement of already existing varieties of dialect, and the production of linguistic uniformity.
Such effacement and assimilation of dialectic varieties, not
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