England, meeting a man from Yorkshire in the north of the same
country, has difficulty in understanding many words in his speech. The
language of the south of Scotland also is English, although it is very
different from the English that we in America are taught. A Frenchman
from the Pyrenees Mountains was taught in school to speak and read the
French language as we find it in books. Yet besides this, he knows a
dialect that is talked by the country people around him, that can not
be understood by the peasants from the north of France near the
Flemish border. The man who lives in the east of France can understand
the dialect of the Italians from the west of Italy much better than he
can that of the Frenchman from the Atlantic coast.

In America, with people moving around from place to place by means of
stage coach, steamboat, and railroad, there has been no great chance
to develop dialects, although we can instantly tell the New Englander,
the southerner, or the westerner by his speech. It should be
remembered that in Europe, for centuries, the people were kept on
their own farms or in their own towns. The result of this was that
each little village or city has its own peculiar language. It is said
that persons who have studied such language matters carefully, after
conversing with a man from Europe, can tell within thirty miles where
his home used to be in the old country. There are no sharply marked
boundaries of languages. The dialects of France shade off into those
of Spain on the one hand and into those of the Flemish and the Italian
on the other.

[Map: Southeastern Europe, 600 B.C.]

The British Isles furnish us with four or five different
nationalities. The people of the north of Ireland are really lowland