e derived
from some more primitive tongue. We find, likewise, on the
American continent, several hundred different languages,
which--to the untrained observer--bear not the slightest
resemblance to each other. This welter and confusion can
also be traced back to a few primitive and uniform languages.

Thus the history of civilization reveals this striking
differentiation in the language of different groups, a
counter-tendency making for a wider uniformity of particular
languages. One "favored dialect" becomes standard, predominant
and exclusive. Thus out of all the French dialects, the
one that survives is the speech of Paris; Castilian becomes
standard Spanish, and in ancient Greece the language of
Athens supersedes all the other dialects. The reasons for the
survival of one out of a great welter of dialects may be various.
Not infrequently the language of a conquering people has, in
more or less pure form, succeeded the language of the conquered.
This was the case in the history of the Romance
languages, which owe their present forms to the spread of
Roman arms and culture. There was, as is well known, a
similar development in the case of the English language. The
Norman Conquest introduced, under the auspices of a socially
superior and victorious group, a language culturally superior
to the Anglo-Saxon. The latter was, of course, not entirely
replaced, but profoundly modified, especially in the enrichment
and enlargement of its vocabulary. One has but to
note such words as "place," "choir," "beef," etc., which
came entirely to replace in the language the indigenous Anglo-Saxon
names for those objects.

Colonization and commercial expansion may bring about
the replacement of the native language of special localities by
the language of the colonizers, at least in hybrid form. The
spread of English through Australia, and through the larger
part of North America, the spread of Spanish through South
America, in each instance practically replacing the native
tongues, are cases in point.[1]

[Footnote 1: Dialects and jargons are often the result of the
partial assimilation by the speakers of one language of another
language to which they are exposed. French-Canadian and
Pennsylvania Dutch are examples of such a mixture.]

STANDARDIZATION OF LANGUAGE. At the present time, and for
some time in the past, the differentiation of language has been
greatly lessened by the stabilizing influence of print. The
printed word