What becomes of the dialects? Generally decline in dignity, until they are spoken only by the lowest strata of society within the language-area; their use may even be discouraged as a mark of ignorance; those who still speak them. may seek both to drop them themselves and to induce their children not to use them; and the young, learning more or less of the standard language, may reproach their elders for continuing to speak dialect.
Where mass-education, extensive inter-communication, military conscription, touring, radio and other aséimilatory processes are operative, dialects tend increasingly to become mere patois (dialects spoken more and more impurely by only the lowest classes) and to disappear, while the population as a whole tends more and more to speak nothing but the standard language.
On the other hand, forces exist which tend to preserve dialects and even languages, notably, a romantic desire to preserve something of the good of the past, and, even more, nationalistic or regionalistic pride, In certain dialect-areas efforts "have been made tp create standard languages.
When for some reason the prestige of a standard language declines, renewed formation of dialects may take place.
It is untrue that dialects invariably preserve older sounds, forms, syntax, and vocabulary than their standard languages, Only the incurably romantic or the very ignorant would allege that the speech of certain isolated moun-famous areas in the United States speak Eliza-bethany English or that the speech of French Canada is the language of the reign of Louis XIV. Nevertheless, it is true that dialects cop-serve much old material which has disappear: from the standard language.
Just as the dialects of a given language have evolved from a common source, so related languages are themselves, in the last analysis, ly dialects derived from a single stock. Exactly as one may trace the dialects of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Rumania, together with the French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Rumanian standard languages, back to a common colloquial Latin, one may term Latin itself an Italic dialect, like its ancient cognates, Oscan, Umbrian and Volscian.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.