Page:The American language; an inquiry into the development of English in the United States (IA americanlanguage00menc 0).pdf/20

 of scholars called the Undersökningen av Svenska Folkmål, formed to investigate it systematically. In Norway there is a widespread movement to overthrow the official Dano-Norwegian, and substitute a national language based upon the speech of the peasants. In Spain the Real Academia Española de la Lengua is constantly at work upon its great Diccionario, Ortografia and Gramática, and revises them at frequent intervals, taking in all new words as they appear and all new forms of old ones. And in Latin-America, to come nearer to our own case, the native philologists have produced a copious literature on the matter closest at hand, and one finds in it excellent works upon the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica. But in the United States the business has attracted little attention and less talent. The only existing comprehensive treatise upon the subject, if the present work be excepted, was written by a Swede trained in Germany and is heavy with errors and omissions. And the only usable dictionary of Americanisms was written in England, and is the work of an English-born lawyer.

I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later