Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 141, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 June 1918 — Slow Growth of Languages. [ARTICLE]

Slow Growth of Languages.

So long as government was conducted exclusively by a throne and aristocracy, the ruling class was constrained to speak one language, that of the court and of polite society. All cultivated people in the land were educated in the same literary tongue, which was naturally used in official transactions. The uneducated classes talked their own dialects and cared little what their rulers spoke. They have not always objected even when these men affected a foreign culture. Frederick the Great thought himself a French litterateur and spelled his name like a Frenchman. But when popular elections were introduced, and still more when primary schools became universal, the question of language assumed a far greater importance, A. Lawrence Towel! writes in the Independent, New York. Then the patter of race was brought to the forefront.