katharevousa has virtually vanished in Greece a refutation of this assumption; it is rather an illustration of Fergusons misinterpretation of the Greek situation, where the polarization between katharevousa and demotic has always been more of a political right-left opposition than a high-low prestige relation. In fact, Fergusons characterization of H as being more codified than L was belied by Greek, because a written norm for demotic evolved naturally on the basis of the speech of Athens, while there were as the poet Cavafis is reported to have said a thousand katharevousas. It is my observation typified by the Peruvian scene depicted at the beginning that diglossia (in the more general sense) typically remains stable in a society as long as most of its children undergo only minimal schooling, limited to a few years of teaching the three Rs; the dialect is then likely to persist as the main vehicle of ordinary conversation in the community. But when a significant segment of youth of both sexes attends school well into adolescence, there is a fairly general tendency for a parastandard based on the school language to become the medium of peer conversation, and, after a greater or lesser number of generations, to displace the dialect altogether. The process is of course accelerated if the authorities discourage or suppress the use of the dialect at school, even during recess; this is how, in the course of the twentieth century, most of the regional dialects and patois died out in France, and how (Cajun) French was lost in Southwest Louisiana. Similar cases abound all over the world. It takes strong counterpressure to oppose this tendency. One example is German Switzerland, where colloquial use of Swiss-German is maintained at all social levels as a kind of symbol of Swiss identity. Similarly, its Paraguayan nationalism that keeps even the educated classes of Paraguay speaking Guarani alongside Spanish. In the last third of the twentieth century the promotion of linguistic diversity and the preservation of threatened linguistic species became causes associated with left-leaning, progressive movements (though such causes are of course inherently conservative, in the literal, nonpolitical sense). At least in part their adoption may have been a reaction to the one-nation-one-language policies that were a hallmark of the fascist and quasi-fascist regimes of the centurys middle third, in contrast to the promotion of regional languages practiced by communist regimes. Even today, opposition to such policies as bilingual education is most likely to come from the right. But it wasnt always thus. The French Revolution saw the dialects spoken by the masses of France (roughly three-quarters of them knew no French, according to a survey undertaken by Abbe Gregoire, the patriot priest) as obstacles to social progress; Gregoires report to the National Assembly was pointedly titled On the need and the means to wipe out the patois and to universalize the use of the French language. A century and a half later, the French linguist Albert Dauzat,(5) writing about attitudes toward the use of Breton in Brittany in the 1920s, reported that the socialists... are rather lukewarm if