Half a dozen languages drifted across a music studio in West Chelsea last week.
Many linguists believe that once two languages have drifted so far apart that they share only 5percentt or so of their vocabulary, chance resemblances will overwhelm the true ones, setting a firm limit on how far back their ancestry can be traced.
At various times, objects onstage (two chairs and the two dancers) are described in awkwardly scientific language that drifts into odd poetry, and a self-mocking play-by-play accompanies reprised sections of dance.
The speakers of Austronesian languages almost certainly drifted into the region in small groups from the Asian mainland or the Pacific Islands over long periods of time.
That's another example of the way political language has tended to drift from left to right over recent decades.
I smiled back, mumbled something in French, my native language, and almost drifted back to sleep, thinking I was at the beginning of a really good dream.
In the case of language that has drifted into disfavor, banning it is a futile effort to remake history, and a dangerous one.
He said the tribe had moved to exclude the black Seminoles partly because modern blacks -- unlike their ancestors, who had dressed as Indians and learned the Seminole language -- had drifted away from cultural identification as Indians.
Campbell hadn't been diagnosed with Alzheimer's yet, not in any official capacity, but it was clear, even then, that he wasn't quite himself — that certain ideas or bits of language were receding, drifting out of reach, like paper boats fluttering across a pond.
An example of the cultural equivalent of genetic drift is with languages.
