Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1919 — Dialect Was Once Good English. [ARTICLE]

Dialect Was Once Good English.

A dialect is folk-speech, a form of the mother tongue spoken by people of native stock, long settled in the district where It prevails. It is of quite an ancient and respectable descent as the accepted speech. Accident has reduced it to the condition of a local or provincial idiom. It has diverged from the standard literary language, or the latter has diverged from it. ;For dialects, as Is well known, are conservative, and cling to many vocables, Inflections, syntactical usages' and pronunciations which are nearer to the primitive tongue than those which have displaced them in the accepted speech.