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, in