had then been Christianized.  A partial explanation is supplied by the earlier visitors, who found the Canary Guanches with no means of communication between the several islands except by swimming.[844] In the Visayan group of the Philippines, inhabited exclusively by the civilized Visayan tribes except for the Negritos in the mountainous interior, the people of Cebu can not understand their brethren in the adjacent islands; in Cuyos and Calmanianes, dialects of the Visayan are spoken.[845] [See map page 147.]

The differentiation of language from the nearby continental speech may be due to a higher development, especially on large islands affording very advantageous conditions, such as Great Britain and Japan.  Japanese speech has some affinity with the great Altaic linguistic family, but no close resemblance to any sub-group.[846] It presents marked contrasts to the Chinese because it has passed beyond the agglutinative stage of development, just as English has sloughed off more of its inflectional forms than the continental Teutonic languages.

[Sidenote:  Archaic forms of speech in islands.]

More often the difference is due to the survival of archaic forms of speech.  This is especially the case on very small or remote islands, whose limited area or extreme isolation or both factors in conjunction present conditions for retardation.  The speech of the Sardinians has a strong resemblance to the ancient Latin, retains many inflectional forms now obsolete in the continental Romance languages; but it has also been enlivened by an infusion of Catalan words, which came in by the bridge of the Balearic Islands during the centuries of Spanish rule in Sardinia.[847] Again, it is in Minorca and Majorca that this Catalan speech is found in its greatest purity to-day.  On its native soil in eastern Spain, especially in Barcelona, it is gradually succumbing to the official Castilian, and probably in a few centuries will be found surviving only in the protected environment of the Balearic Isles.  Icelandic and the kindred dialects of the Shetland and Faroe Islands had their origin in the classic Norse of the ninth century, and are divergent forms of the speech of the Viking explorers.[848] The old Frisian tongue of Holland, sister speech to Anglo-Saxon, survives to-day only in West Friesland beyond the great marshlands, and in the long-drawn belt of coastal islands from Terschelling through Helgoland to Sylt, as also on the neighboring shores of Schleswig-Holstein.[849] This region of linguistic survival, insulated partially by the marshes or completely by the shallow “Wattenmeer” of this lowland coast, reminds us of the protracted life of the archaic Lithuanian speech within a circle of sea and swamp in Baltic Russia, and the survival of the Celtic tongue in peninsular Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, in Ireland, and the Highlands and islands of Scotland.

[Sidenote:  Unification of race in islands.]