"One should not think that a dialect is a "badly spoken" language: it is indeed a full-fledged language, with a specific grammar and lexicon. If however it is said today that Italian, Spanish or French are languages, it is not because they are richer, handsomer or better structured than Leonese, Napolitan or Picard, but because they have acquired more prestige by becoming literary and official languages for constituted States. The idioms that were the starting points of these three languages, respectively the Tuscan dialect of Florence, the Castillan dialect and the dialect of the Ile-de-France, were themselves, originally, but dialects spoken on a reduced geographical area."
- Henriette Walter, in L'aventure des langues en Occident, p132.
