The strongest evidence for a community of origin of the Maskoki tribes is furnished by the fact that _their dialects belong to one linguistic family_. The numerous incorporations of foreign elements have not been able to alter the purity of their language; the number of intrusive words is very small, and the grammar has repelled every foreign intrusion. This is the inference we draw from their best studied dialects, for with some of them, as with Ábika, we are not acquainted at all, and with others very imperfectly. The principal dialects of the family greatly differ from each other; Cha'hta, for instance, is unintelligible to the Creek, Koassáti and Hitchiti people, and the speech of each of these three tribes is not understood by the two others. When Albert Gallatin published his vocabularies of Cha'hta and Creek, he was uncertain at first whether they were related to each other or not. On the other side, the difference between Cha'hta and Chicasa, and between Creek and Seminole, is so insignificant that these dialects may be considered as practically identical. The degree of dialectic difference points approximately to the date of the separation of the respective communities, and untold centuries must have elapsed since the two main branches of the family were torn asunder, for Cha'hta differs about as much from Creek as the literary German does from Icelandic.