WRITTEN AND SPOKEN TELUGU
as ungrammatical as colloquial Telugu. This contention is obviously due to utter ignorance. We shall in a future number attempt to explain what is meant in English by the terms colloquial, vulgar, slangy, dialectal, archaic &c, and wind up this article by saying that the idea that those speakers of English who do not speak what is technically known as a dialect in the special sense of the term, are reproducing or attempting to reproduce, in their speech the language of books is fundamentally erroneous.' Call it by what name you like, Polite English, Standard spoken English, good English, colloquial English or simply English, it is a living dialect, and as grammatical as any other language and is the mother tongue of all the living English men and English women, of English boys and English girls of the upper class wherever they may live. It is not learnt from books but from living persons, by association. It is at any given moment nearly uniform but never fixed; is always tending to change. It has more prestege than other English dialects which are now disappearing before it.
Such is also the mother tongue of the upper classes among the Telugus. It is imperceptably assimilating to itself the dialects of other classes who are now in close contact with the upper
