The notion of adaptation or adaptability inevitably triggers associations with evolutionary theory. In a discussion of language, this link is both a useful and a potentially pernicious one. It is useful, since the emergence and development of language are no doubt part of a wider adaptive process. This will be briefly discussed in section 2.1 of the present essay. But there is more. Having emerged, language can also be said to function adaptively in its everyday manifestations. This will be the topic of section 2.2. The pernicious nature of the intuitive link between the notion of adaptability and evolutionary theory manifests itself when it is all too easily assumed, as happens regularly, that the originally biological notion remains unchanged when used as in the second part of this essay. There a brief account of a proposal to turn adaptability into a key concept for a theory of pragmatics (section 3.1) will be first presented, followed by a quick glance at some of the ways in which an adaptability perspective has been, or is being, applied to a variety of topics in the field of pragmatics (section 3.2). Through the contrast between the first (sections 2.1 & 2.2) and the second part (sections 3.1 & 3.2), this essay aims at indicating the problematic status of a straightforward identification of these two uses of the term ‘adaptation’, as entertained in biological and social-interactive accounts of linguistic behavior, respectively. Generally, this essay sets out to discuss how we adapt to language (or, in other words, how humans developed a predisposition for language) and how language adapts to us, once we have a linguistic repertoire to choose from. The first question is one where language is considered the product of largely causal biological processes, while the second focuses on reasons speakers may have in selecting this or the other form of expression in language use.