Excerpt from A Primer of Spoken English

English had become the ofiicial and literary language of the whole kingdom, it was natural that the same dialect in its spoken form should become the general speech of the educated classes, and that as centralization increased, it should preponderate more and more over the local dialects. But the unity of spoken English is still imperfect: it is still liable to be in¿uenced by the local dialects - in London itself by the Cockney dialect, in Edinburgh by the Lothian Scotch dialect, and so on.

The comparative purity and correctness of the different varieties of spoken English is popularly estimated by the degree of approximation to the written language. But these comparisons are generally carried out in a one sided and partial spirit. When an Englishman hears the distinct r and g/z in the Broad Scotch farther, mghl, etc., he is apt to assume at once that Scotch English is more archaic than Southern English, but if he looks at the evidence on the other side, such forms as alz az' oo=all one wool will make him more inclined to believe what is the truth, namely that standard spoken English is, on the whole, quite as archaic, quite as correct and pure as any of its dialects - a truth which before the rise of modern philological dilettanteism and dialect-sentimentality no one ever thought of disputing.

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