Sociolinguistics and Social Semiotics

Abstract

The history of linguistic thinking in the twentieth century has to be seen against the background of its concerns in the preceding century with uncovering the histories and relationships of the Indo-European family of languages. It is a story of continuous change, of languages becoming differentiated over time, of connections becoming obscured, yet recoverable through the formulation of ‘laws’ of linguistic change. It is a story of a journey through time across a large part of Asia and all of Europe. Change is the theme of that journey. Against that concern with history and change, the twentieth century has focused on the system of language out of time. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is credited with being the originator of this turn. In a series of lectures given at the beginning of that century he formulated a distinction between a concern with language seen in time, a diachronic view, and language seen as a system at one moment, a synchronic view.