DIALECT, from the Greek dialectos, Latin dialectus, Ancient French dialecte, a conversa tion, discourse, manner of speaking, language of a district or country; derived from the Greek verb dialegestkai, to speak through, or across. Hence the term dialect, strictly applied, signi fies speech or vehicle of conversation, phrase ology, idiom, apart —though not necessarily— from what is written. A dialect that is indig enous or native to a particular plaCe is called a vernacular. A striking example of the latter exists in the so-called Pennsylvania-German di alect, a mixture of Frankish and Alemannic, which in recent years has blossomed into a literature. In relation to modern languages, dia lect usually means a variety or form of speech differing from the standard or literary "lan guage; a local variation. The French call this patois,. their scholars distinguish dialects as variations of a language which is not a common or written language. In its widest sense the name dialect is applied to branch languages springing from a common root, as the Romance tongues, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Rumanian, originated from a common Latin root. Dialects are not in all cases mutilated or corrupted forms of their standard language, for not only does every great language owe its origin to dialects, but is merely a promoted or elevated dialect itself. The English language arose from the Old Saxon, Old Frankish and Old Frisian dialects, with a large admixture of Latin, Norman-French and the standard or lit erary French of Paris. But it was not till Chaucer's time, the latter half of the 14th cen tury, that the East Midland dialect of Britain geographically located between the Northern and Southern dialects —became the English lit erary language. There were then six great forms of local speech, divided into smaller groups. What decided the superiority —if there was any — of the East Midland dialect, was the threefold recommendation that it was the court language, the language of Wyclif's translation of the Bible, and the language in which Chaucer wrote. Despite his modern detractors, the influ ence of Chaucer, "the father of English litera ture,)) was the predominant factor not in mak ing, but in starting, the English language. Yet no one who knows that language as it is to-day could, without special study, read Chaucer's dia lect and understand it. Philologists assure us that even Shakespeare's English, if spoken, would be quite unintelligible to our ears. Great languages need centuries to grow; their scien tific frame-work and vast vocabu laries represent the contributions of untold thinkers and writers. Dialects, on the other hand, are not consciously created; their primi tive origins are veiled in obscurity or, like the beginnings of human speech, entirely unknown, They grow and develop naturally like trees. But a tongue that is merely spoken or not tot tensively written cannot well become fixed: for that a literature is necessary. Chaucer. wrote in his own dialect and laid the foundation of a • that dialect became the literary lan guage. There were four distinct dialects in an cient Greece — the Ionic, Attic, Doric and lEolic, each of which possessed a literature; but the greater refinement and the cultivation of arts and sciences in Athens, where Attic was spoken, finally gave that dialect the superiority; it became the Greek language. Thucydides wrote in Attic, while Herodotus wrote in Ionic, yet none will assert that the ((dialect* of Herod otus was a corruption of that of Thucydides.
The modern Greek, or Romaic, is derived from the Attic form, ,and -is rather a dialect than a language, notwithstanding that it is .the_ most important tongue in the Levant. The Tuscan dialect became the language of Italyjhrough the genius of Dante, whose mother-tongue it as also of his great successor, Petrarek Italian has many dialects, and even to this day the Italians have iwf decided which is the cor rect form of the second' person plural/ More than half of the people use vei, and the rest; lei. The accident that 'Luther spoke the High German dialect and translated the Bible into it made that .dialect the standard German lan guage, though here again, as in English, enor mous changes have taken place through the adoption of foreign words. The Low German or Plattdeutseh (Pladdiitsch) beaks a strong re semblance • to English, while some of the South ern German dialects are 'almost incomprehensi ble to the High German. Just as London has its "cockney" dialect, so both Berlin and Vi enna have special German dialects,•easily recog nizable. In the Slavonic family of languages numerous dialects are also The Great Russian is remarkably free from dialects; Ukrainian or Little Russian may almost be re garded as a distinct language with a literature of its own. But fully 80,000,000 people under stand the literary Russian language — the *Mos cow dialect.* Few living languages have so many dialects as the Arabic. Not infrequently one finds several different dialects spoken in the various districts of the same city. The literary Arabic is inviolably fixed by the Koran, but the Arabic of Egypt differs from that of the Sudan, while greater dialect groups exist in Syria, Tunis, Algiers and Morocco. Dialects of Turkish tone the most scientifically con structed languages) are spoken throughout cen tral Asia to China, and also as far north as the White Sea. Maltese is a mixed dialect of Italian and Arabic. The Jewish dialects of Eu rope, though based upon biblical Hebrew and the neo-Hebraic idiom of the Talmud and Mishna, incorporate many French, German, Spanish, Russian or Polish words, according to the country in which they are spoken. The so called is largely German, and is un derstood throughout Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Balkans. Chinese may be divided into two branches — the written language and the spoken language. The former Is understood by all who can write, but the latter is so violently split up into dialects that sometimes Chinese of different provinces can only verbally com municate with each other through the medium of apidgin* English. In the Philippines some 30 distinct languages, divided into almost in numerable dialects, are spoken both by the Malayan and Negrito tribes. The great lan. guages of India present a bewildering mass of dialects. It is estimated that the Iramic and Indic groups of the Aryan family of languages have some 135 dialects • the Dravidian, about 30; the Tibeto-Burman, 84; the island of Sumatra, 14; Celebes, 5; Madagascar, 9; in Australasia, according to one British authority, there are 112 aboriginal languages and dialects. In Africa, Abyssinia possesses two dialects — the t, Tigre and Amharic, deriv frbm the Ethiopic; the Bantu languages, Ha sa, Suaheli and Yo ruba, in fact, every nativ tongue, is split up into dialects or tribal vernaculars. Not a few, indeed unknown to white men.