In stark contrast to the development of linguistic research during the nineteenth century, the Cours de linguistique générale promotes a primacy of synchronic linguistics and introduces the idea of language as an abstract concept (langue) next to the observable linguistic usage (parole). This distinction has shaped linguistic thinking since the early twentieth century. My main claim is that this view is not compatible with empirical language data, but is motivated by eighteenth and nineteenth-century discourses about language (and reproduces them in a modernized guise). More generally, I wish to show that varying and changing discourse about linguistic essentialism is an example of the way long-term change of ideologies is based on implicit continuations of some of its crucial tropes.
The discovery of the historicity of language(s) competes all through the nineteenth century with an essentialist stance on language which presupposes that languages are clearly definable entities and which is based on a conceptual unity both between 'language' and 'writing/literature' and between 'a language' and 'a nation'. As neither side argues completely isolated from the other, the two ideological strands eventually culminate in the claim that linguistics needs to take "deux routes absolument divergentes" (Saussure). While nobody would adhere to any such radical distinction nowadays, the distinctions between 'system' and 'usage' in linguistics still represents and reinforces that between languages as pre-given, natural (and, ultimately, political) entities and the underlying dynamics and fluidity of vernacular speaking practices.
In spite of the complete absence of claims such as 'one nation has one language' within linguistics, I will show that several prevailing tenets in present-day linguistics – rather than resulting from observation – are consequences of exactly that essentialist thinking which emerged in the context of the European nation-building process. Deconstructing these ideological foundations which helped shaping twentieth-century linguistics will enable us to deal with a number of so far unsolved (untackled) questions. Examples are the language/dialect distinction and the definition and operationalization of 'well-formedness', but also the commonly accepted distinction between 'system' and 'usage' (langue / parole). My contribution will therefore provide evidence that an analytic deconstruction of language ideologies and meta-linguistic discourses will directly contribute to an enhanced understanding of the character and emergence of linguistic structures and should therefore be taken as an indispensable methodological tool in linguistic studies.
References:
von Mengden, Ferdinand & Britta Schneider. To appear 2022: Modern Linguistics – A Case of Methodological Nationalism? Language, History, Ideology: The Use and Misuse of Historical-Comparative Linguistics. Edited by Camiel Hamans and Hans Henrich Hock. Oxford: OUP.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1916 [1972]. Cours de linguistique générale. Publié par Charles Bally et Albert Sechehaye. Avec la collaboration de Albert Riedlinger. Édition critique préparée par Tullio de Mauro. Payothèque. Paris: Payot.
