If the nineteeth century was an era of comparative and historical philology, the twentieth century saw a decisive shift in favor of descriptive or synchronic linguistics. Where German scholars had led the way in the previous century, the emergent twentieth-century academic discipline was to be dominated by Americans. But the man often seen as the father of what became known as structural linguistics, our focus here, was in fact a Swiss. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose thinking underpins most work undertaken in this century and the last, merits consideration in some detail, as many of the dichotomies with which he is associated – langue/ parole; syntagmatic/paradigmatic; signifiant/signifié – have become part of the conceptual toolkit not just of linguistics but also of structuralist approaches to literature and social sciences.

Here we will examine the Course in General Linguistics with which Saussure is associated, the concepts it introduced and their relevance to contemporary linguistic thought. We then consider the legacy of Saussure’s thinking in the work of the North American Descriptivists, who established linguistics as a respectable academic discipline partly by breaking away from universal models based on Classical European languages and treating each language as a system in its own right.

From this relativist position emerged what became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the suggestion that languages actually mould the world view of their speakers to a very significant degree – which we assess at the end.