language.

The principle of equality necessarily introduces several other changes
into language. In aristocratic ages, when each nation tends to stand
aloof from all others and likes to have distinct characteristics of its
own, it often happens that several peoples which have a common origin
become nevertheless estranged from each other, so that, without ceasing
to understand the same language, they no longer all speak it in the same
manner. In these ages each nation is divided into a certain number of
classes, which see but little of each other, and do not intermingle.
Each of these classes contracts, and invariably retains, habits of
mind peculiar to itself, and adopts by choice certain words and certain
terms, which afterwards pass from generation to generation, like their
estates. The same idiom then comprises a language of the poor and a
language of the rich--a language of the citizen and a language of the
nobility--a learned language and a vulgar one. The deeper the divisions,
and the more impassable the barriers of society become, the more must
this be the case. I would lay a wager, that amongst the castes of India
there are amazing variations of language, and that there is almost
as much difference between the language of the pariah and that of the
Brahmin as there is in their dress. When, on the contrary, men, being no
longer restrained by ranks, meet on terms of constant intercourse--when
castes are destroyed, and the classes of society are recruited and
intermixed with each other, all the words of a language are mingled.
Those which are unsuitable to the greater number perish; the remainder
form a common store, whence everyone chooses pretty nearly at random.
Almost all the different dialects which divided the idioms of European
nations are manifestly declining; there is no patois in the New World,
and it is disappearing every day from the old countries.

The influence of this revolution in social conditions is as much felt
in style as it is in phraseology. Not only does everyone use the same
words, but a habit springs up of using them without discrimination. The
rules which style had set up are almost abolished: the line ceases to
be drawn between expressions which seem by their very nature vulgar, and
other which appear to be refined. Persons springing from different ranks
of society carry the terms and expressions they are accustomed to use
with them, into whatever circumstances they may pass; thus the ori