[Footnote 1: By the word "primitive" the linguistic experts mean a language the existence of which is inferred from common features of several related languages, of which written records are current, but of which no actual records exist. Thus, if there were no written records of Latin the approximate reconstruction of it by linguists would be called "Primitive Romance."] The process of differentiation in the languages of different groups is very marked. We find, for example, in the early history of Greece and Rome, a number of widely different dialects. There seems every evidence that these were derived from some more primitive tongue. We find, likewise, on the American continent, several hundred different languages, which--to the untrained observer--bear not the slightest resemblance to each other. This welter and confusion can also be traced back to a few primitive and uniform languages. Thus the history of civilization reveals this striking differentiation in the language of different groups, a counter-tendency making for a wider uniformity of particular languages. One "favored dialect" becomes standard, predominant and exclusive. Thus out of all the French dialects, the one that survives is the speech of Paris; Castilian becomes standard Spanish, and in ancient Greece the language of Athens supersedes all the other dialects. The reasons for the survival of one out of a great welter of dialects may be various. Not infrequently the language of a conquering people has, in more or less pure form, succeeded the language of the conquered. This was the case in the history of the Romance languages, which owe their present forms to the spread of Roman arms and culture. There was, as is well known, a similar development in the case of the English language. The Norman Conquest introduced, under the auspices of a socially superior and victorious group, a language culturally superior to the Anglo-Saxon. The latter was, of course, not entirely replaced, but profoundly modified, especially in the enrichment and enlargement of its vocabulary. One has but to note such words as "place," "choir," "beef," etc., which came entirely to replace in the language the indigenous Anglo-Saxon names for those objects. Colonization and commercial expansion may bring about the replacement of the native language of special localities by the language of the colonizers, at least in hybrid form. The spread of English through Australia, and through the larger part of North America, the spread of Spanish through South America, in each instance practically replacing the native tongues, are cases in point.[1] [Footnote 1: Dialects and jargons are often the result of the partial assimilation by the speakers of one language of another language to which they are exposed. French-Canadian and Pennsylvania Dutch are examples of such a mixture.]