continually recalls the standard pronunciation
and meaning, and the changes in language (save those deliberately
introduced by the addition of scientific terms, or the
official modifications of spelling, etc., as in some European
countries[2]) are much less rapid, various, and significant than
hitherto. It is true that differences in articulation and usage,
especially the former, do still, to a degree, persist and develop.
Our Southern accent, with its drawling of words and slurring
of consonants, our Middle-Western accent, with its stressed
articulation of "r's" and its nasalizing tendencies, are
instances of this persistence.

[Footnote 2: In France the Ministry of Education from time to time
settles points of orthography definitely.]

But the printed language--English, for example--the
official language, which is published in the newspapers, periodicals,
and books, which is taught in the schools, and spoken
from the pulpit, the platform, on the stage, in cultivated
society, is more or less alike all over the United States and
wherever English is spoken. It is, of course, only a standard,
a norm, an ideal, which like the concept of the circle, never
quite appears in practice. The language which is spoken,
even in the conversation of the educated, by no means conforms
to the ideal of "correct usage." But the important
fact is that the standard language _is_ a standard, that it is,
moreover, a widely recognized and effective standard. The
dictionaries and the grammars become authoritative, and are
referred to when people consciously set about discovering
what _is_ the accepted or correct meaning or pronunciation.
But a more effectual authority is exerted by the teaching they
receive at school, and the continuous, though unnoticed,
influence of the more or less standard language which they read
in print.

Even phonetic changes, though they persist, are checked
from spreading to the point of mutually unintelligible dialects
by the standards enforced in print. The "accents" in various
parts of the United States, for example, differ, but not to
the point of becoming absolutely divergent languages. The
Southerner and the Westerner may be conscious in each
other's speech of a quaint and curious difference in pronunciation,
but they can, except in extreme cases, completely
understand each other.[1]

[Footnote 1: Some of the isolated districts in the Kentucky mountains
reveal dialects with some important differences in