Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/203

V.] if we must follow back the fates of our race until they centre in a limited number of families or in a single pair, which expanded by natural increase, and scattered, forming the little communities which later fused together into greater ones—and who will deny that it was so?—then, also, both by analogy and by historical necessity, it follows that that is the true view of the relation of dialects and language to which we have been led above: namely, that growth and divarication of dialects accompany the spread and disconnection of communities, and that assimilation of dialects accompanies the coalescence of communities.

Prevalence of the same tongue over wide regions of the earth's surface was, indeed, impossible in the olden time, and human speech is now, upon the whole, tending toward a condition of less diversity with every century; but this is only owing to the vastly increased efficiency at present of those external influences which counteract the inherent tendency of language to diversify. As, here in America, a single cultivated nation, of homogeneous speech, is taking the place of a congeries of wild tribes, with their host of discordant tongues, so, on a smaller scale, is it everywhere else: civilization and the conditions it makes are gaining upon barbarism and its isolating influences. In the fact that Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Italians, on entering our community, all learn alike to say with us verity, there is nothing which at all goes to prove that verity, vérité, verdad, and verità are primitive dialectic varieties, tending toward unity; nor, in the extended sway of the cultivated tongues of more modern periods, is there aught which in the most distant manner favours the theory that dialects are antecedent to uniform speech, and that the latter everywhere grows out of the former.

It is true, again, that a certain degree of dialectic variety is inseparable from the being of any language, at any stage of its history. We have seen that even among ourselves, where uniformity of speech prevails certainly not less than elsewhere in the world, no two individuals speak absolutely the same tongue, or would propagate absolutely the same, if circumstances should make them the founders of independent linguistic traditions. However small, then, may have been