Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician, and philosopher of language. He was a founding father of twentieth-century linguistics and may be considered, with Charles Sanders Peirce, a founder of semiotics.
Saussure approached language as both a system of signs (a semiotic system) and a social phenomenon (a product of the language community). The methodology he created to study language from these dual perspectives provided the basis of structuralism, which a later generation of philosophers, semioticians, linguists, and anthropologists, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, applied to such fields as literature, psychoanalysis, popular and commercial culture, and anthropology.
Born in Geneva on November 26, 1857, Ferdinand de Saussure was the son of a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist. He enrolled in the Institution Martine in 1870 and, on graduation, continued his studies at the Collège de Genève before entering the University of Geneva, where he studied Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. In 1876, he entered the University of Leipzig for graduate work, publishing just two years later Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo européennes (Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages). Moving on to the University of Berlin, he studied Celtic and Sanskrit, and then returned to Leipzig to defend his doctoral dissertation on a topic in Sanskrit linguistics. He was awarded the Ph.D. in 1880.
Saussure lectured at the University of Paris on Sanskrit, Gothic, and Old High German. Beginning in 1881, he taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, in Paris, remaining there for eleven years, during which he was honored with the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Offered a professorship at the University of Geneva in 1892, he returned to his native country and taught Sanskrit and Indo-European there until his death on February 22, 1913.
It was during this final period that he first offered his Course of General Linguistics, which helped to transform the field when the lectures were collected and posthumously published in 1916 as the Cours de linguistique Générale.
Saussure was able to reconstruct theoretically the Proto-Indo-European language vocalic system, which greatly aided the study of ancient languages, including the decipherment of Hittite. His contributions to general linguistic theory, however, made an impact far beyond philology and linguistics. His two-tiered conception of language, which he viewed as the langue (the abstract, invisible layer of language) and the parole (spoken speech), was the basis of a broader theory of structuralism, which emerged in the work of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who analyzed myths on the theory that all have an underlying pattern driving their structure and making them myths as opposed to mere tales. Following LeviStrauss, structuralism has been applied to many other fields of study.
For Saussure, the linguistic sign was the organizing principle of linguistic structure. He embarked on an analytical inquiry into how arbitrary signs, sounds of distinct phonological shape, evolve into meaning via grammatical structure. This was the inquiry he developed in the lectures that constituted the Course in General Linguistics. He approached language as “a system of signs that expresses ideas” and thus evolved semiology, the science devoted to the study of the life of signs within society. This has proved to be a fruitful basis for the development of a philosophy of language and, by extension, the fields of epistemology and ontology as applied to language.
