We have the overview of Sapir’s Language and its two-part walkthrough (one, two). Now one idea, up close — the book’s most influential: drift. Chapters 7–8.
1. A language moves down time
Why do dialects arise at all? Each speaker’s fluctuations are constantly levelled toward the group average. So why does difference persist?
Sapir’s answer: a language is not just a still picture spread out in space.
Language moves down time in a current of its own making. It has a drift. (ch. 7)
2. What drift is
Daily fluctuations are random, “like the waves of the sea, moving backward and forward in purposeless flux.” But drift has direction.
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. (ch. 7)
That direction “may be inferred, in the main, from the past history of the language.” We tend to feel our language is “practically a fixed system” and that any change is “as likely to move in one direction as another.” “The feeling is fallacious. Our very uncertainty as to the impending details of change makes the eventual consistency of their direction all the more impressive.”
3. The fate of “whom”
Sapir’s analysis is exhaustive. The faint reluctance to say “Whom did you see?” comes from four things — the asymmetry of form (which/what/that have no objective), the feeling that an interrogative should be invariable and strong, the word order (objective after the verb), and the heavy, clumsy rhythm of whom did — and these are “canalized into a single force.”
It is safe to prophesy that within a couple of hundred years from to-day not even the most learned jurist will be saying “Whom did you see?” (ch. 7)
“The uneducated folk that says ‘Who did you see?’ with no twinge of conscience has a more acute flair for the genuine drift of the language than its students.” But Sapir adds a caution: knowing the rough direction of a drift is not enough to see where it is heading. “We need to know something of the relative potencies and speeds of the components of the drift.”
4. Three major drifts in English
The four factors around “whom” are interesting less in themselves than as symptoms of larger tendencies. Sapir names three:
- Levelling the subjective/objective distinction. The seven Indo-European cases fell to four in Germanic; in Old English accusative and dative merged (the modern “objective” him is the old dative taking over the accusative’s work); the possessive is narrowing to “animate” nouns (the phases of the moon over the moon’s phases; even its is starting to give way to of it).
- Position in the sentence carries syntax. As the forms thinned, word order took over. he and him are becoming “pre-verbal / post-verbal” forms rather than subjective / objective — as my father / father mine are the pre- and post-nominal possessive. So the folk says “it is me,” not “it is I.” Chaucer’s “it am I” feels alien now because his I was still strong enough to bend the verb.
- Toward the invariable word. A striving for “a simple, unnuanced correspondence between idea and word, as invariable as may be.” The -m of whom is only a drag on the interrogative’s force.
The insidious thing about a drift:
Where it cannot destroy what lies in its way it renders it innocuous by washing the old significance out of it. It turns its very enemies to its own uses. (ch. 7)
I / me are too different in sound to level. But two new categories — positional (pre-verbal / post-verbal) and classificatory (animate / inanimate) — are invading the old case alignment. English moves toward the analytic without drifting toward “pure” relational concepts in the Chinese manner: the insistence on the concreteness of relational concepts outlasts even the strongest drifts.
5. A dialect is drift that went its own way
A language splits into dialects not because of individual variation as such but because “two or more groups of individuals have become sufficiently disconnected to drift apart.” Once a locality’s speech begins to drift on its own account, “it is practically certain to move further and further away from its linguistic fellows.”
Ancient Greek’s dialects were levelled into Attic (the Koine); the Koine then split into new dialects — “old dialects are being continually wiped out only to make room for new ones.” And: “Dialect, language, branch, stock … are purely relative terms. They are convertible as our perspective widens or contracts.” Modern Irish, English, Italian, Greek, Russian, Armenian, Persian and Bengali are only the present end-points of drifts that converge on one point in the distant past.
6. A phonetic law is one formula for a drift
Chapter 8. Within one dialect and one period, sound change is regular — it operates without exception. But it is not a mystical “law.”
Phonetic laws do not work with spontaneous automatism … they are simply a formula for a consummated drift that sets in at a psychologically exposed point and gradually worms its way through a gamut of phonetically analogous forms. (ch. 8)
Set English foot/feet beside German Fuß/Füße over 1500 years and “their general parallelism is obvious. Indeed we might say that to-day the English and German forms resemble each other more than does either set the West Germanic prototypes from which each is independently derived” — because each inherited the same slope. And analogy keeps re-levelling the irregularities that sound change produces.
In sum
| The idea of drift | |
|---|---|
| A language moves down time and has a slope | an “unconscious selection” of variations that accumulate one way |
| The direction is inferable from the past; the landing point depends on the components’ strength and speed | “whom will go, but when and how is another matter” |
| Drift washes the meaning out of what it cannot destroy | “it turns its very enemies to its own uses” |
| A dialect is a group that drifted independently | “dialect, language, stock are relative terms” |
| A phonetic law is a formula for a consummated drift | the English/German parallel, and re-levelling by analogy |
Why it still matters: treating language change as an internal tendency rather than an outside force, the claim that change has direction, and the focus on speakers’ unconscious selection — these became foundations of later historical linguistics and of sociolinguistics (the study of variation and change).
Next: the book’s other core — language, race and culture are separate (chapters 9–10). For the overview, see “Reading Edward Sapir’s Language”.
