Saussure: language as social fact

Summarized by: Saeed Mojarradi Ph.D. Candidate

Book Name: Schools of Linguistics   written by: Geoffrey Sampson

By the end of 19^th century the question of language with biological species had largely been abandoned. This created a difficulty for the notion of linguistics as an academic discipline:If languages are not living species, in what sense are they things that can be studied at all?The linguistic analogue of a biological individual is a person’s idiolect and this is almost as much as the wider concept of a language.