of the two great divisions of speakers of English, and ought to continue to unite them—and it will, we hope, do so: but more or less completely, according as that portion of the community which is most directly reached and effectively guided by literature is allowed authority over the rest.
We are, however, by no means free from dialects among our own population, although we may hope that they will long, or always, continue to be restricted within narrow limits of variation from the standard of correct speech, as they are at present. The New Englander, the Westerner, the Southerner, even of the educated class, betrays his birth to a skilled observer by the peculiarities of his language; and the lower we descend in the social scale, the more marked and prominent do these peculiarities become. There is hardly a locality in the land, of greater or less extent, which has not some local usages, of phrase or utterance, characterizing those whose provincialism has not been rubbed off by instruction or by intercourse with a wider public. There is a certain degree of difference, too, of which we are all conscious, between the written and the colloquial style: there are words and phrases in good conversational use, which would be called inelegant, and almost low, if met with in books; there are words and phrases which we employ in composition, but which would seem forced and stilted if applied in the ordinary dealings of life. This is far from being a difference sufficient to mark the literary English as another dialect than that of the people; yet it is the beginning of such a difference; it needs no change in kind, but only a change in degree, to make it accord with the distinction between any literary language which history offers to our knowledge and the less cultivated dialects which have grown up in popular usage by its side, and by which it has been finally overthrown and supplanted.
Nothing, then, as we see, can absolutely repress dialectic growth; even the influences most powerfully conservative of identity of language, working in the most effective manner which human conditions have been found to admit, can only succeed in indefinitely reducing its rate of progress.
