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Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 1, p. 350.

350 THE INĄDIAN EMAPIRE [CHAP. reaching significance have been put forth concerning them, but these have not yet all earned general acceptance. In regard to the Dravidian languages, on the other hand, our knowledge has been almost stationary. Bishop Cald- well's monumental Comparaivie Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, which was fully utilized in the last edition of this Gazetteer, still remains our one authority. Only a few gram- mars of unimportant tribal dialects, such as Gond, Kurukh, and Kandh, together with one or two more grammars and dictionaries of the well-known classical languages of Southern India, have appeared during the past two decades. The final word has not, however, been said regarding any of the Indian vernaculars, not even the Aryan ones. While we know a good deal about some of the languages, our information as to the dialects is, with one or two exceptions, most incomplete. Even in respect to the forms of speech with which we are familiar, and whose habitats are matters of com- monplace, we often do not know where these habitats begin or end. There are many languages, too, spoken by wild tribes of the Hindu Kush, or of Further India, of which we know little or nothing except the names. A consideration of these facts has led the Government of India to commence a systematic survey of all the forms of speech employed in Northern and Eastern India, and in the Presidency of Bombay. This is rapidly approaching completion, and we may hope that its results when published will materially increase the world's information regarding one of its most interesting language- fields. So far as these results are available, they have been incorporated in the present chapter. All this is a subject about which natives of India, a land whose literary glory may almost be said to be founded on the labours of its indigenous grammarians, are curiously incurious. Few natives at the present day are able to comprehend the idea connoted by the words 'a language.' Dialects they know and understand. They separate them and distinguish them with a meticulous, hair-splitting subtlety, which to us seems unnecessary and absurd; but their minds are not trained to grasp the conception, so familiar to us, of a general term em- bracing a number of interconnected dialects. It is as if we, in England, spoke of 'Somersetshire' and 'Yorkshire' dialects, but never used the term 'English language.' It thus follows that, while the dialect-names in the following pages have been taken from the indigenous nomenclature, nearly all the language-names have had to be invented by Europeans. Some