ples" is of no real
interest, however, to linguistic science. What lies beyond the
demonstrable must be left to the philosopher or the romancer.

[Footnote 127: "Dialect" in contrast to an accepted literary norm is a
use of the term that we are not considering.]

[Footnote 128: Spoken in France and Spain in the region of the
Pyrenees.]

We must return to the conception of "drift" in language. If the
historical changes that take place in a language, if the vast
accumulation of minute modifications which in time results in the
complete remodeling of the language, are not in essence identical with
the individual variations that we note on every hand about us, if these
variations are born only to die without a trace, while the equally
minute, or even minuter, changes that make up the drift are forever
imprinted on the history of the language, are we not imputing to this
history a certain mystical quality? Are we not giving language a power
to change of its own accord over and above the involuntary tendency of
individuals to vary the norm? And if this drift of language is not
merely the familiar set of individual variations seen in vertical
perspective, that is historically, instead of horizontally, that is in
daily experience, what is it? Language exists only in so far as it is
actually used--spoken and heard, written and read. What significant
changes take place in it must exist, to begin with, as individual
variations. This is perfectly true, and yet it by no means follows that
the general drift of language can be understood[129] from an exhaustive
descriptive study of these variations alone. They themselves are random
phenomena,[130] like the waves of the sea, moving backward and forward
in purposeless flux. The linguistic drift has direction. In other words,
only those individual variations embody it or carry it which move in a
certain direction, just as only certain wave movements in the bay
outline the tide. The drift of a language is constituted by the
unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual
variations that are cumulative in some special direction. This direction
may be inferred, in the main, from the past history of the language. In
the long run any new feature of the drift becomes part and parcel of the
common, accepted speech, but for a long time it may exist as a mere
tendency in the speech of a few, perhaps of a despised few. As we look
about us and observe current usage, it is n