Every spoken dialect of Hindostan has a per-centage of Sanskrit words in it; just as every dialect of England has an amount of Anglo-Norman. What does this prove? That depends upon the per-centage; and this differs in different languages. In a general way it may be stated that, amongst the tongues already enumerated, it is smallest in the isolated Tamulian tongues; larger in the Tamul of the Dekhan; and largest in the tongues about to be enumerated; these being the chief languages of modern Hindostan. 1. The _Marathi_ of the Mahrattas. Here the Sanskrit words amount to four-fifths in the Marathi dictionaries. 2. The _Udiya_, of Cuttack and Orissa, with a per-centage of Sanskrit greater than that of the Marathi, but less than that of-- 3. The _Bengali_. Here it is at its _maximum_, and amounts to nine-tenths. 4. The _Hindú_, of Oude, and the parts between Bengal and the Punjâb, falling into the subordinate dialects of the Rajpút country. 5. The _Gujerathi_ of Gujerat. 6. The _Scindian_ of Scinde. 7. The _Multani_ of Múltan; probably a dialect of either the Gujerathi or-- 8. The _Punjabi_ of the Punjâb. By going into minor differences this list might be enlarged. None of the previous languages were mentioned in the last chapter; in fact, they were those different Hindú tongues which were contrasted with the Tamulian, and which, in the northern part of the Peninsula had effected those displacements which separated, or were supposed to separate, the Rajmahali, Kól, and Khond dialects from each other. They formed the _sea_ of speech, in which those tongues were _islands_. Now what is the inference from these per-centages? from such a one as the Bengali, of ninety out of one hundred? What do they prove as to the character of the language in which they occur? Do they make the Sanskrit the basis of the tongue, just as the Anglo-Saxon is of the English, or do they merely show it as a superadded foreign element, like the Norman--like that in kind, but far greater in degree? The answer to this will give us the philological position of the North-Indian tongues. It will make the Bengali either Tamul, with an unprecedented amount of foreign vocables, or Sanskrit, with a few words of the older native tongue retained. If the question were settled by a reference to authorities, the answer would be that the Bengali was essentially Sanskrit. It would be the same if we took only the _primâ facie_ view of the matter. Yet the answer is traversed by two facts. 1. In making the per-centage of Sanskrit words it has been assumed that, whenever the modern and ancient tongues have any words in common, the former has always taken them from the latter,--an undue assumption, since the Sanskrit may easily have adopted native words. 2. The grammatical inflections are so far from being as Sanskritic as the vocables, that they are either non-existent altogether, unequivocally Tamul, or else _controverted_ Sanskrit.