 External. Second, a distinct meaning based on ‘external’ was folded into the neologism ‘E-language’ to suggest criticism of any view that conceives of a natural language as a public, intersubjectively accessible system used by a community of people (often millions of them spread across different countries). Here, the objection is that languages as thus conceived have no clear criteria of individuation in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On this conception, the subject matter of interest is a historico-geographical entity that changes as it is transmitted over generations, or over mountain ranges. Famously, for example, there is a gradual valley-to-valley change in the language spoken between southeastern France and northwestern Italy such that each valley’s speakers can understand the next. But the far northwesterners clearly speak French and the far southeasterners clearly speak Italian. It is the politically defined geographical border, not the intrinsic properties of the dialects, that would encourage viewing this continuum as two different languages.