languages are the speech of
peoples who have been conquered but not yet culturally absorbed by the
dominant language group. They are mostly isolated rural populations who
have remained to a large extent outside of the cosmopolitan cultures of
the cities. These people while not wholly illiterate have never had
enough education in the language of the dominant peoples of the cities
to enable them to use this alien speech as a medium of education. The
consequence is that, except for a relatively small group of
intellectuals, they have been cut off from the main current of European
life and culture. These linguistic revivals have not been confined to
any one nation, since every nation in Europe turns out upon analysis to
be a mosaic of minor nationalities and smaller cultural enclaves in
which the languages of little and forgotten peoples have been preserved.
Linguistic revivals have, in fact, been well-nigh universal. They have
taken place in France, Spain, Norway, Denmark, in most of the Balkan
States, including Albania, the most isolated of them all, and in all the
smaller nationalities along the Slavic-German border--Finland, Esthonia,
Letvia, Lithuania, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Roumania, and the Ukraine.
Finally, among the Jews of Eastern Europe, there has been the Haskala
Movement, as the Jews of Eastern Europe call their period of
enlightenment, a movement that has quite unintentionally made the
Judeo-German dialect (Yiddish) a literary language.

At first blush, it seems strange that the revivals of the folk
speech should have come at a time when the locomotive and the
telegraph were extending commerce and communication to the
uttermost limits of the earth, when all barriers were breaking
down, and the steady expansion of cosmopolitan life and the
organization of the Great Society, as Graham Wallas has called
it, seemed destined to banish all the minor languages,
dialects, and obsolescent forms of speech, the last props of an
international provincialism, to the limbo of forgotten things.
The competition of the world-languages was already keen; all
the little and forgotten peoples of Europe--the Finns, Letts,
Ukrainians, Russo-Carpathians, Slovaks, Slovenians, Croatians,
the Catalonians of eastern Spain, whose language, by the way,
dates back to a period before the Roman Conquest, the Czechs,
and the Poles--began to set up presses and establi