In America, with people moving around from place to place by means of stage coach, steamboat, and railroad, there has been no great chance to develop dialects, although we can instantly tell the New Englander, the southerner, or the westerner by his speech.  It should be remembered that in Europe, for centuries, the people were kept on their own farms or in their own towns.  The result of this was that each little village or city has its own peculiar language.  It is said that persons who have studied such language matters carefully, after conversing with a man from Europe, can tell within thirty miles where his home used to be in the old country.  There are no sharply marked boundaries of languages.  The dialects of France shade off into those of Spain on the one hand and into those of the Flemish and the Italian on the other.

[Map:  Southeastern Europe, 600 B.C.]

The British Isles furnish us with four or five different nationalities.  The people of the north of Ireland are really lowland Scotch of Germanic descent, while the other three-fourths of Ireland is inhabited by Celts.  To make the difference all the greater, the Celts are almost universally Catholics, while the Scotch-Irish are Protestants.  The people of the north of Scotland are Gaels, a Celtic race having no connection in language or blood with the people of the southern half of that country.  The Welsh are a Celtic people, having no relationship with the English, who are a Germanic people.  The Welsh and the Cornish of Cornwall and the people of highland Scotland are the descendants of the ancient Britons and Gaels who inhabited the island when Julius Caesar and the Romans first landed there.  Then five hundred years afterwards, as has already been told, came great swarms of Germans (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), who drove the Britons to the west and north, and settled the country now known as England.  After these, you will recall, came a number of Danes, another Germanic people, who settled the east coast of England.  Two hundred years later, the Normans came from France.  These Normans had been living in France for a century or two, but had come originally from Norway.  Normans, Danes, Angles, and Saxons all mixed to make the modern English.  Together, they fought the Scotch, the Welsh and the Irish, and having conquered them, oppressed them harshly for many centuries.

[Map:  Southeastern Europe, 975 A.D.]

But it is in the southeastern corner of Europe that one finds the worst jumble of nationalities.  Six hundred years before Christ, the Greeks and their rougher cousins, the Thracians, Macedonians, and Dacians inhabited this district.  When one of the Roman Emperors conquered the Dacians about 100 A.D., he planted a large Roman colony north of the Danube River.  Then came the West Goths, who swept into this country, but soon left it for the west of Europe.  Next came the Slavic tribes who are the ancestors of the modern Serbs.  Following these, came a large tribe