Antoine Meillet

How Words Change Meaning Antoine Meillet

The language has for first condition the existence of human societies which it is his side constantly used and essential instrument; except historical accident, the limits of the various languages tend to coincide with those of social groups called nations; the lack of unity of language is the sign of a recent State, as in Belgium, or artificially constituted, as in Austria. The language is so eminently a social fact. Indeed, it exactly fits the definition proposed Durkheim; a language exists independently of the individuals who speak it, and although it has no reality outside the sum of these individuals, it is however, due to its generality, external to each of them; which shows, is that it does not depend on any of them to change and deviation individual usage causes a reaction. This reaction has no more often than other sanction than the ridicule to which she exposes the man who does not like everyone else. But in modern civilized States, she goes up to exclude public jobs, by reviews, those who do not comply with the use allowed by a given social group. The characters of exteriority to the individual and coercion by which Durkheim defined the social fact appear in the language with the last evidence.