THK CONFLICT OK LANGUAGES. 137 



eler in \'olapuk ; Kiiglish and Chinese may chaffer in Pid^^^in- 

 Knglish — but beneath these special planes of contact each is 

 a man living and thinking- in his mother tongue. These sec- 

 ondary or added languages do not belong to a community ; 

 they are creatures of an occasion. They are used for the 

 expression of only a part of the speaker's life, the accidental 

 and not the essential. No child learns them first. They never 

 have ousted a vernacular. Until — by some almost unimagi- 

 nable social condition — they can be intruded between mother 

 and child, they have no chance of success in competition with 

 the vernacular. They play their special part and remain sec- 

 ondary languages. They exhibit no growth or development 

 toward universality as we have above defined it. The condi- 

 tions under which they are produced and perpetuated are not 

 the conditions under which peoples give up their vernaculars. 



Nor is the superiority of a language over others an aid to 

 its extension. Languages do not directly compete. Any 

 given word or form of language can be brought into antago- 

 nism with another only when and where both are understood. 

 Generally this can only occur within the same community. 

 This competition is well shown in the case of synonymous 

 expressions, one of which ousts the other from their common 

 province of meaning, either completely, when the latter dis- 

 appears, or incompletely, when some previously undefined 

 part of the meaning is left for it to adopt. Thus the good old 

 English 'a'itcna-i>;cmot has been ousted by parlia^ncnt for his- 

 toric reasons explicable enough were it useful here to go 

 beyond the fact. And so the directly derived legal has usurped 

 the meaning just as properly and etymologically once belong- 

 ing to the Norman form loyal , and the latter modified to a 

 derivative meaning not covered by the former. On the other 

 hand pen- never competes with father ; they have no common 

 area of contest. Only one of them is associated with the idea 

 in earliest childhood, and the other, learned later as a foreign 

 word, is simply understood through the first. 



The law of the survival of the fittest, therefore, operates 



