English, like every other literary language, has always had its dialects and will long continue to possess them in secluded districts, though they are at the present time losing much of that archaic character which gives them their chief value.

The spread of education may profoundly modify them, but the spoken language of the people will ever continue to devise new variations and to initiate developments of its own.

Even the "standard" language is continually losing old words and admitting new ones, as was noted long ago by Horace; and our so-called "standard" pronunciation is ever imperceptibly but surely changing, and never continues in one stay.
In the very valuable _Lectures on the Science of Language_ by Professor F.Max Mueller, the second Lecture, which deserves careful study, is chiefly occupied by some account of the processes which he names respectively "phonetic decay" and "dialectic regeneration"; processes to which all languages have always been and ever will be subject.
By "phonetic decay" is meant that insidious and gradual alteration in the sounds of spoken words which, though it cannot be prevented, at last so corrupts a word that it becomes almost or wholly unmeaning.
Such a word as _twenty_ does not suggest its origin.

Many might perhaps guess, from their observation of such numbers as _thirty, forty_, etc., that the suffix _-ty_ may have something to do with _ten_, of the original of which it is in fact an extremely reduced form; but it is less obvious that _twen-_ is a shortened form of _twain_.

And perhaps none but scholars of Teutonic languages are aware that _twain_ was once of the masculine gender only, while _two_ was so restricted that it could only be applied to things that were feminine or neuter.