Ferdinand de Saussure on Language vs. Speech

Introductory Remark

What is the best way to think about language? Where did language come from? Why do we have it? How do we use it? What do we use it for?

Since the early 20th century, an important resource in answering these kinds of questions has been Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.

Now the Course in General Linguistics, it has to be said, is kind of a strange text. It was not actually written by Saussure. Saussure taught the course on which the book is based three times around the end of his life (he died in 1913). After his death, three of Saussure’s students collected as many notes as they could from various other students who had attended these three courses on linguistics. Then they edited these notes together into book form. The book was published in 1916. So the Course is not necessarily what Saussure said or believed, but what students heard and what the editors thought made sense. We might best see the book as a collaboration between Saussure and his students: Saussure gave some courses about linguistics, his students interpreted what he said in these courses, and then the editors interpreted the students’ interpretations.

I mention this only because it’s interesting context. I’m not a Saussure specialist, so how closely the text conforms to Saussure-the-person’s own views doesn’t interest me too much. I’m interested in the usefulness and the impact of the ideas, whether they came from Saussure himself or were inventions of his students. For convenience, I’ll talk about what Saussure says or thinks. But keep in mind that the name “Saussure” in this context doesn’t refer to an actual, individual person.

Whoever is responsible for the book, I find it useful for thinking about language. And it’s a very clear book, especially in the Wade Baskin translation that I’m going to refer to here (I’m using the 2011 edition put out by Columbia University Press). Rereading parts of it recently, I found it to be quite lucid, although some concepts are definitely tricky to understand.

I want to discuss a couple of things in connection with Saussure. In this essay I’ll deal with his distinction between language and speech; I think this is important for reasons I’ll get into. In a second essay I’ll discuss Saussure’s view of the unit of language.

Language vs. Speech

First, language and speech. Saussure uses three French terms which need to be carefully distinguished: langage, langue, and parole. I’m not going to focus on the first, langage. Langage is translated by Baskin as “speech,” but it’s really something like the faculty of communication or language-in-general. Langue is more like a language, which is to say, a particular system of conventions (English, German, Japanese, Swahili) that allows us to communicate ideas to each other. And parole is usually translated by Baskin as “speaking,” which is a particular use of language.

So we have these two things, language and speaking. Let’s try to say more about them.

Early on, Saussure defines language like this: “It is both a social product of the faculty of speech [that is, langage] and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty” (p. 9). Language comes out of our natural need or natural capacity to communicate with each other (our “faculty of speech”); and it’s the set of conventions that have evolved over time to aid this communication.

And what do we mean here by a “set of conventions”? For Saussure, a convention is something like a rule for matching sounds and concepts. Language, he says, is “a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas” (p. 10). Now the word “sign” is a common word in semiotics which means a thing that stands for something else. For Saussure, the signs of language are “sound-images” which are connected by social convention with concepts/ideas (I don’t think the text distinguishes between ideas and concepts, so I’ll use both terms). When we learn a language we learn to associate certain bits of sound with certain ideas — for example, to associate the sound “horse” with the idea of the animal horse. Saussure is especially famous for his concept of the sign. A sign, for Saussure, consists of a signifier (the sound-image, e.g., the word “horse”) and a signified (the concept, e.g., the idea of a horse). I’ll come back to this point about the linguistic sign in a bit.

The sign (sound-image + concept) is part of language. Speaking, on the other hand, is for Saussure a much more “heterogeneous” phenomenon. Language, he says, is purely social; it exists apart from any particular person. But speaking is social and individual. Moreover, on the level of the individual it combines (1) the physical, (2) the physiological, and (3) the psychological (p. 9, pp. 11–12). What this means is that speaking involves (1) various acoustic features (or light reflections in the case of visual language), (2) various activities of the sense organs and vocal organs and nervous system, and (3) the association of a sound-image and concept. The first is a matter of physics; the second is a matter of physiology; and the third is a matter of psychology.

The last part, the psychological, is where language (as a set of conventions) exists for the individual. When we learn a language we’re taking something purely social and making it part of our individual psychology. We are assimilating into our individual psychologies the set of conventions which link sound-images and concepts. At least in terms of language, the psychology of the individual is something like an individualized version, variation, or subset of a social system. Through learning, you come to embody the culture in which you were raised, including its language.

Reflections

I like Saussure’s distinction between language and speech because it fits nicely with my own interpretation of Morse Peckham’s semiotics (found in books such as Explanation and Power, 1979). Peckham’s semiotics is based on a fundamental split between the sign and the sign-response. Of course, we make this split only for convenience of analysis. In actual life things are all tangled up. But it’s convenient to analyze out the sign (something in perception to which a response is appropriate) from the actual behavioral response to the sign.

At a higher level, Peckham makes a division between culture and society. Culture is instructions for behavior, or what we might call conventions or norms (“thou shalt not kill,” etc.). Society, on the other hand, is what you get when those instructions are followed out, with all the inevitable confusions and errors and deviancies that naturally occur. Thus the socialized individual is an embodiment of his or her culture.

In this way of thinking about culture and society, language is a subset of culture. Language is instructions for making and using words, while speaking involves following those instructions. Language is a set of norms regulating a certain kind of behavior. When those norms are translated into behavior, you get acts of speaking.

Saussure uses the helpful example of a symphony (p. 18). A symphony — say Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — is a set of instructions for musicians. When musicians follow those instructions, you get an actual concrete performance of the symphony. This performance is bound to be different from every other performance. But Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has its own distinct existence as a set of instructions. This existence is distinct from whether anyone performs it, and it is also separate from whether anyone performs it well. The Ninth Symphony is like a language, and a performance of it is like an act of speech.

Speaking, however, as Saussure points out, comes first. Historically, people started making noises before there were social conventions about how to do it. Likewise, babies start making noises to get what they need before they learn the language, and they hear other people speaking before they have learned the language (pp. 18–19). When people start to agree that certain noises mean certain things, you get language, which then comes to regulate their behavior. So language and speaking are always interacting and modifying each other. They have a certain kind of reciprocal interaction and interdependence (p. 19). Innovations (or errors) in speaking can affect language conventions, which then change how people speak.

This, then, is the important distinction between language and speaking. As a linguist, Saussure wants to focus mainly on language. This is because language can be studied in a more unified way (recall that speaking involves physics, physiology, and psychology, and thus is quite complicated to study). In the next essay I will move on to the tricky problem of the unit of language.