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164 educated, those who make up good society, speak the literary German; their children are trained in it; nothing else is written. The popular dialects are still as numerous as ever, because education is not pervading and thorough enough to extirpate them; and their existence may be prolonged for an indefinite period; but the literary language exercises a powerfully repressing and assimilating effect upon them all; it has lessened their rank and lowered their character, by withdrawing from them in great measure the countenance and aid of the cultivated; it has leavened them all with its material and its usages; and it may finally succeed in crowding them altogether out of use. Its sway extends just as far as the external influences which established it reach: it is not confined to the territory occupied by the High-German dialects, its nearest kindred; the people of the northern provinces also, speaking tongues of Low-German descent, which are much more nearly related with the Netherlandish, or even with the English, are drawn by the ties of political, social, and religious community with the rest of Germany to accept and use it. While, on the other hand, political independence, aided by diversity of social and religious usages, has given a separate existence as a literary language to the Dutch or Netherlandish, and yet more notably to the English, descendants of dialects originally undistinguished among the crowd of Low-German idioms which lined the shores of the North Sea.

The history of most other literary languages is of the same character with that which we have just been examining. Each was, at the outset, one out of a number of kindred but more or less diverse forms of speech, and the predominance which it came to gain over them was the result, not of its inherent merits as an instrument of thought and means of communication, but of outward circumstances, which made its usages worth the acquisition of a wider and wider community. Thus the parent language of the modern French was the vernacular speech of only a small part of the population of France; and it long had a rival, and almost a superior, in the early and highly cultivated dialect of southern France, the Provençal, or langue d'oc; nor,