now examine, and which involves, as you will see, a more real
principle of growth.

In order to understand the meaning of _dialectical __ regeneration_ we
must first see clearly what we mean by dialect. We saw before that
language has no independent substantial existence. Language exists in man,
it lives in being spoken, it dies with each word that is pronounced, and
is no longer heard. It is a mere accident that language should ever have
been reduced to writing, and have been made the vehicle of a written
literature. Even now the largest number of languages have produced no
literature. Among the numerous tribes of Central Asia, Africa, America,
and Polynesia, language still lives in its natural state, in a state of
continual combustion; and it is there that we must go if we wish to gain
an insight into the growth of human speech previous to its being arrested
by any literary interference. What we are accustomed to call languages,
the literary idioms of Greece, and Rome, and India, of Italy, France, and
Spain, must be considered as artificial, rather than as natural forms of
speech. The real and natural life of language is in its dialects, and in
spite of the tyranny exercised by the classical or literary idioms, the
day is still very far off which is to see the dialects, even of such
classical languages as Italian and French, entirely eradicated. About
twenty of the Italian dialects have been reduced to writing, and made
known by the press.(34) Champollion-Figeac reckons the most
distinguishable dialects of France at fourteen.(35) The number of modern
Greek dialects(36) is carried by some as high as seventy, and though many
of these are hardly more than local varieties, yet some, like the
Tzaconic, differ from the literary language as much as Doric differed from
Attic. In the island of Lesbos, villages distant from each other not more
than two or three hours have frequently peculiar words of their own, and
their own peculiar pronunciation.(37) But let us take a language which,
though not without a literature, has been less under the influence of
classical writers than Italian or French, and we shall then see at once
how abundant the growth of dialects! The Friesian, which is spoken on a
small area on the north-western coast of Germany, between the Scheldt and
Jutland, and on the islands near the shore, which has been spoken there
for at least two thousand years,(38) and which possesses literary
documents as old as the t