Saussure: language as social fact

Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure, was born in Geneva in 1857. He was the son of a Huguenot family, members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, which had emigrated from Lorraine during the French religious wars of the sixteenth century. 

Saussure was trained as a linguist of the conventional, historical variety, and became outstandingly succesful as such at a very early age: his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenns (1878), remains one of the landmarks in the recostruction of Proto-Indo-European. Saussure lectured at the École Practique des Hautes Études in Paris from 1881 to 1891.

At the end of 1906, Saussure taught the course 'General linguistics and the history and comparison of the Indo-European languages', and in the 1908-9 and 1910-11 sessions.

Thanks to him the emphasis of the language shifted from language change to language description. His insistence than language is a carefully built structure of interwoven elements initiated the era of structural linguistics.

He died in 1913 without having published any theoretical material. Two of his colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye decided to reconstruct them from notes taken by students together with such lecture-notes as Saussure had left behind: the book they produced, the Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1916), was the vehicle by which Saussure's thought became known to the scholary world. It is in virtue of this work that Saussure is recognized as the father of twentieth-century linguistics.