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THE CUMBERLAND DIALECT. 



By John Eichaedson, (St. John's Vale, Keswick.) 



As the Cumbrian is only one among a great number of dialects which 

 are sijoken in Bi'itain, each of which differs more or less from the others 

 in pronunciation and idiom, it perhaps may not be out of place, by way of 

 introduction to the subject under consideration, to glance at the probable 

 origin of the dialects in past times, and the causes of the slow but gradual 

 disuse which they seem destined to fall into in the future. 



No one who has thought at all on the subject can fail to see that the 

 origin of so many different modes of speech in this country has been 

 principally owing to the absence of a written language, and, in a less 

 degree, to the imperfect means of communication which existed in primi- 

 tive times between one district and another. It is little more than four 

 hundred years since printing was first introduced into England, and although 

 there might be printed books a few years sooner, and manuscripts 

 some centuries earlier still, these, besides many of them being in Latin, 

 were so extremely scarce and inaccessible that there could not be said 

 to be any written language available to the common people, among whom 

 the dialects originated, until towards the end of the fifteenth century. 



Now, it is supposed that the first inhabitants of Britain were Celts, 

 who crossed over from Denmark about five or six centuries before the 

 Christian era ; and, assuming this to be correct, there was a period of 

 more than two thousand years during which the people of this island had 

 no written language, and consequently no fixed standard of speech— a fact 

 which is of itself quite sufficient to account for all the variations and 

 irregularities which have prevailed. 



Setting out with the assumption (which is by no means certain) that 

 the first settlers all spoke the same language, or dialect, which would of 

 course be Celtic, we can easily imagine how, in the course of time, when 



