dialects

• different d. spoken every 40 miles among primitives

68:1.6That con­tem­po­rary cul­tural so­ci­ety is a rather re­cent phe­nom­e­non is well shown by the pres­ent-day sur­vival of such prim­i­tive so­cial con­di­tions as char­ac­ter­ize the Aus­tralian na­tives and the Bush­men and Pyg­mies of Africa. Among these back­ward peo­ples may be ob­served some­thing of the early group hos­til­ity, per­sonal sus­pi­cion, and other highly an­ti­so­cial traits which were so char­ac­ter­is­tic of all prim­i­tive races. These mis­er­able rem­nants of the nonso­cial peo­ples of an­cient times bear elo­quent tes­ti­mony to the fact that the nat­u­ral in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic ten­dency of man can­not suc­cess­fully com­pete with the more po­tent and pow­er­ful or­ga­ni­za­tions and as­so­ci­a­tions of so­cial pro­gres­sion. These back­ward and sus­pi­cious an­ti­so­cial races that speak a dif­fer­ent di­alect ev­ery forty or fifty miles il­lus­trate what a world you might now be liv­ing in but for the com­bined teach­ing of the cor­po­real staff of the Plan­e­tary Prince and the later labors of the Adamic group of racial up­lifters.

• origin illustrated by baby talk in family

81:6.17Lan­guage evolved out of group as­so­ci­a­tions, each lo­cal group de­vel­op­ing its own sys­tem of word ex­change. Lan­guage grew up through ges­tures, signs, cries, im­i­ta­tive sounds, in­to­na­tion, and ac­cent to the vo­cal­iza­tion of sub­se­quent al­pha­bets. Lan­guage is man’s great­est and most ser­vice­able think­ing tool, but it never flour­ished un­til so­cial groups ac­quired some leisure. The ten­dency to play with lan­guage de­vel­ops new words—slang. If the ma­jor­ity adopt the slang, then us­age con­sti­tutes it lan­guage. The ori­gin of di­alects is il­lus­trated by the in­dul­gence in “baby talk” in a fam­ily group.

81:6.18Lan­guage dif­fer­ences have ever been the great bar­rier to the ex­ten­sion of peace. The con­quest of di­alects must pre­cede the spread of a cul­ture through­out a race, over a con­ti­nent, or to a whole world. A uni­ver­sal lan­guage pro­motes peace, in­sures cul­ture, and aug­ments hap­pi­ness. Even when the tongues of a world are re­duced to a few, the mas­tery of these by the lead­ing cul­tural peo­ples might­ily in­flu­ences the achieve­ment of world-wide peace and pros­per­ity.