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dread lead to a plan of speaking with as little apparent move- 
ment of the face as possible ; hence labials and fine distinctions 
in vowels disappear, and gutturals, with slight modifications 
of the “ ur-vocale ” (Sanskrit ) take their place in the 
development. 
2. Not only national peculiarities, but those of individuals, 
influence the language of a tribe. A natural defect in the 
articulation of a powerful chieftain would lead his followers, 
out of respect, to imitate that very defect, or at least to con- 
ceal their possession of superior powers of speech. Even 
amongst ourselves we can often observe a tendency to affect 
some peculiarity in the enunciation or mode of expression of 
a leading man ; his very phrases are caught up and incor- 
porated into the language of his admirers. In the days of 
unwritten language such imitation must have had a very 
decided and permanent effect upon the speech of a tribe. 
3. A fertile source of variations in dialect is the tendency 
to imitate the imperfect pronunciation of children, and to clip 
and alter words in order to adapt them to their untrained 
organs. Cases of this kind are familiar to ourselves. There is 
scarcely a family in whose domestic language some eccentric 
phrase or mis -pronunciation has not become current, derived 
from the prattle of some one of its youthful members. Such 
disturbances as these are of course counteracted by the com- 
parative fixedness of a written language : the family argot is 
confined within the circle in which it was produced. But in 
earlier days, without this impediment to change, as in illiterate 
tribes at this day, the mimicry of children was doubtless a 
powerful disturbing force, affecting not only the forms, but 
the grammatical inflexions of words, and their collocation in 
sentences. 
4. Superstition in less civilized tribes, and, to a slight extent, 
social rules in more civilized communities, affect the language. 
Many words and phrases which were usual in this country two 
centuries ago have become offensive, quaint or ridiculous, and 
as such are practically banished from our normal literary tongue, 
though they linger in our provincial dialects. The verbal in- 
flexion in th (hath, goeth, &c.) is now quite lost in classical 
English, though it was current a century ago, and common 
at double that distance of time. Now, if an inflexion can 
be lost in this manner out of a written language in whose 
literary remains it is of continual occurrence, it is plain that 
under circumstances of less restraint the process of alteration 
would go on more rapidly ; and two portions of the same 
tribe, separated from one another by a range of mountains 
or an arid plain, might find, after half a century without 
