Note 847 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

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.