At certain points in their historical development, languages are not adequately equipped to serve their societies and do not offer certain communicative functions. Political and cultural domination can influence the language community to adopt a foreign language for higher communication, leaving the vernacular underdeveloped for those communication registers. Sudden changes in the communicative needs of the community may not give the vernacular a chance to adapt and develop necessary registers. The concept of language adaptation assumes that the speech community is capable of changing its language to meet new communicative needs, as German, English, Japanese, and others have. Language adaptation, usually a gradual and continuous process that goes almost unnoticed by the speech community, can occur by conscious intervention in a linguistic crisis. It can become a political goal involving cultural and linguistic values. The decisive factor in successful language adaptation is the determination of the speech communities rather than their languages' structural and lexical makeup. (MSE)