When we say “language,” we are usually pointing at several different things at once: the movements of the mouth and tongue, sound waves, meaning in the head, social habit, writing. In the Course in General Linguistics, Saussure cuts this bundle into three: langage / langue / parole. This piece takes just that one distinction, slowly, quoting the book. For the whole book in miniature, see the “overview”; for a fuller plain-language walk-through, “Explained, Part 1”.
Quotations are from the French original (Cours de linguistique générale, Payot, 1916; Introduction, chs. III–IV). English renderings are L/LAB’s.
Why a split was needed
Before Saussure, the study of language was mostly history: comparing older and newer forms, reconstructing ancestral languages. He stops one step earlier and asks: what is linguistics even the study of?
The trouble is that language-as-a-whole is wildly mixed. It runs across the physical (sound waves), the physiological (phonation and hearing), and the psychological (meaning and the sound-image); it is at once individual and social, at once a working system and a product of the past. Saussure writes: “taken as a whole, langage is many-shaped and heteroclite” (Pris dans son tout, le langage est multiforme et hétéroclite, ch. III). You cannot point at that and say “this is the object.”
Hence a famous line: “far from the object coming before the point of view, one would say that it is the point of view that creates the object” (Bien loin que l’objet précède le point de vue, on dirait que c’est le point de vue qui crée l’objet, ch. III). So you must fix a viewpoint and carve an object out.
Langage: all of language, and the power to speak
Langage is the whole of everything to do with language, and at the same time the faculty of speech itself. What is natural to us, Saussure argues, is not any particular spoken tongue but “the faculty of constituting a language — that is, a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas” (la faculté de constituer une langue, c’est-à-dire un système de signes distincts correspondant à des idées distinctes, ch. III). Cases of aphasia point the same way: what is lost is less the power to make a given sound than “a more general faculty, the one that governs signs” (une faculté plus générale, celle qui commande aux signes).
Langage as a whole cannot be the object of a science. So Saussure pulls two things out of it.
Langue: the system, carved out
Langue is the sign system a community shares, lifted out of langage. In Saussure’s definition it is “both a social product of the faculty of language and a set of necessary conventions, adopted by the social body to let individuals exercise that faculty” (C’est à la fois un produit social de la faculté du langage et un ensemble de conventions nécessaires, adoptées par le corps social pour permettre l’exercice de cette faculté chez les individus, ch. III). Unlike the messy whole, it is “a whole in itself and a principle of classification” (un tout en soi et un principe de classification, ch. III).
Think of langue as the rulebook of a sport: roughly the same copy sits in every member’s head, and no individual can rewrite it. Saussure goes further: “language is not a function of the speaking subject; it is the product that the individual registers passively” (La langue n’est pas une fonction du sujet parlant, elle est le produit que l’individu enregistre passivement, ch. III).
The speaking-circuit: where the line falls
The boundary between langue and parole shows up when you take a conversation apart. In speaker A’s head a concept calls up a sound-image (psychological); the brain signals the vocal organs (physiological); sound waves cross from mouth to ear (physical); in hearer B the order reverses, from sound-image back to concept. If B replies, the same path runs backward.
To keep only the social fact, Saussure trims the circuit. Out goes the physical part (hear an unknown language and you catch the sounds but stay outside the social fact). Out goes the executive side: “execution is never carried out by the mass; it is always individual, and the individual is always its master; we shall call it parole” (l’exécution n’est jamais faite par la masse ; elle est toujours individuelle, et l’individu en est toujours le maître ; nous l’appellerons la parole, ch. III). What is left is langue — “a treasure deposited by the practice of parole in the subjects belonging to one community” (un trésor déposé par la pratique de la parole dans les sujets appartenant à une même communauté, ch. III) — located in the narrow segment where sound-image meets concept.
Parole: the one-off act
Parole is an individual using that system to speak, here and now. Saussure calls it “an individual act of will and intelligence” (un acte individuel de volonté et d’intelligence, ch. III), and distinguishes two parts: “the combinations by which the speaking subject uses the code of the language to express his own thought” (les combinaisons par lesquelles le sujet parlant utilise le code de la langue en vue d’exprimer sa pensée personnelle), and “the psycho-physical mechanism that lets him externalize those combinations” (le mécanisme psycho-physique qui lui permet d’extérioriser ces combinaisons). Wilful, one-off, and — unlike langue — not a collective instrument.
Two formulas
Saussure contrasts the two modes of existence with two formulas.
Langue exists in the community “as a sum of imprints deposited in each brain, roughly like a dictionary of which all the copies, identical, are handed out among the individuals” (une somme d’empreintes déposées dans chaque cerveau, à peu près comme un dictionnaire dont tous les exemplaires, identiques, seraient répartis entre les individus, ch. IV). So add them up and you still get one: “1 + 1 + 1 + 1… = 1 (collective model)” (modèle collectif, ch. IV).
Parole, by contrast, has “nothing collective in it; its manifestations are individual and momentary” (Il n’y a donc rien de collectif dans la parole ; les manifestations en sont individuelles et momentanées, ch. IV). Its formula: (1 + 1′ + 1″ + 1‴…).
The symphony
Saussure writes: “one can compare langue to a symphony, whose reality is independent of the way it is performed; the mistakes the musicians playing it may make in no way compromise that reality” (on peut comparer la langue à une symphonie, dont la réalité est indépendante de la manière dont on l’exécute ; les fautes que peuvent commettre les musiciens qui la jouent ne compromettent nullement cette réalité, ch. IV). The vocal organs are “as external to langue as the electrical devices used to transcribe Morse code are foreign to that code” (les organes vocaux sont aussi extérieurs à la langue que les appareils électriques qui servent à transcrire l’alphabet Morse sont étrangers à cet alphabet, ch. IV).
Separable, yet leaning on each other
Separating langue from parole means making two cuts at once: “1° what is social from what is individual; 2° what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental” (1° ce qui est social de ce qui est individuel ; 2° ce qui est essentiel de ce qui est accessoire et plus ou moins accidentel, ch. III).
Still, each needs the other: “langue is necessary for parole to be intelligible and produce all its effects; but parole is necessary for langue to become established; historically, the fact of parole always comes first” (la langue est nécessaire pour que la parole soit intelligible… mais celle-ci est nécessaire pour que la langue s’établisse ; historiquement, le fait de parole précède toujours, ch. IV). We learn our mother tongue by hearing others, until it is “deposited in our brain only after countless experiences.” Parole is also what makes language change. Saussure sums up: langue “is at once the instrument and the product” of parole — and yet the two are “two absolutely distinct things” (deux choses absolument distinctes, ch. IV).
The first fork
“This is the first bifurcation one meets on trying to build a theory of language. One must choose between two roads that cannot be taken at the same time; they have to be followed separately” (Telle est la première bifurcation… Il faut choisir entre deux routes qu’il est impossible de prendre en même temps ; elles doivent être suivies séparément, ch. IV). Saussure chooses “linguistics proper, the one whose sole object is langue” (la linguistique proprement dite, celle dont la langue est l’unique objet, ch. IV).
Why it still matters
The three-way split gave linguistics an object of its own. The sign (signifier and signified), synchrony and diachrony, value through difference — every major idea in the Course stands on langue. In the twentieth century this “see it as a system” move spread to anthropology, literary theory and philosophy as structuralism. Chomsky’s competence / performance is a distant echo of langue / parole (with the weight placed differently). Pragmatics and discourse analysis, in turn, can be read as building the “linguistics of parole” back up afterward.
A note on the words
Saussure insists he has “defined things, not words.” Everyday vocabulary does not line up with the split: “German Sprache means ‘langue’ and ‘langage’; Rede is roughly ‘parole’ but adds the sense of ‘discourse.’ Latin sermo means rather ‘langage and parole,’ while lingua names ‘langue.’ No word corresponds exactly to any of the notions set out above” (Aucun mot ne correspond exactement à l’une des notions précisées plus haut, ch. III). English generally keeps the French terms, or renders langue as “language,” parole as “speech” or “speaking,” and langage as “human speech” or “the language faculty.”
For the same book in brief, see the “overview”; for the fuller walk-through, “Part 1” and “Part 2”.
