Ferdinand Saussure - Course in General Linguistics

For this session, we'll be reading Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Part 1 (General Principles) & Part 2 (Synchronic Linguistics). If you are struggling to complete Part 2, we recommend focusing on Chapter 4 (Linguistic Value). This book is our first reading on the theory of Structuralism.

Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics” is a landmark work in Linguistics and Structuralism. The book wasn’t penned by Saussure himself—it was pieced together by his students from lecture notes after his death. Saussure’s central insight in the lectures is that language is not just a collection of words, but a structured system of signs whose meaning comes from their relationships and differences. He distinguishes between “langue,” the shared system underlying language, and “parole,” the individual acts of speech, arguing that it’s the system—the rules and conventions—that really shapes how we communicate and think.

This approach became the foundation of structural linguistics and launched the broader study of signs, or semiology, influencing everything from anthropology to literary theory. Saussure’s key move was to show that language is a social product and a tool for constructing reality, not just a set of labels for things in the world. His ideas made it possible to analyze not only language, but also culture, as a network of codes and conventions—a perspective that still reverberates across the humanities and social sciences.