A PRIMEVAL MOTHER TONGUE 



fashionable dialects. As southern France came 

 more and more under the sway of Paris, the 

 second of these centres indeed lost its relative 

 importance, and the Proven9al tongue gradually 

 sank into an unfashionable patois ; but Parisian 

 and Tuscan, on the other hand, came to be so 

 generally read and spoken that after a while they 

 quite crowded their intermediate sister dialects 

 out of sight, and to-day they are the sole recog- 

 nized representatives of good French and good 

 Italian speech, although there is still a great deal 

 of French spoken that is not Parisian, and a 

 great deal of Italian that is not Tuscan. This 

 predominance of the two central dialects is in 

 our day increasing more rapidly and decisively 

 than ever before, and the process will unques- 

 tionably go on until all Frenchmen speak Pari- 

 sian, and all Italians speak Tuscan. Railroads 

 and telegraphs, newspapers and novels, have 

 already sealed the death-warrant of all patois, 

 and the execution is only a question of time. 

 It is because of the wide diffusion in our own 

 country of these powerful agencies for keeping 

 men in contact with each other that we have no 

 varieties of dialect here worth speaking of. It 

 is not at all likely that in this country such dia- 

 lectic variations will ever spring up. And for 

 the same reason it is not likely that any essen- 

 tial divergence will ever arise between the Eng- 

 lish language as spoken in England and the 

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