Leonard Bloomfield Book Award

Linguistic Society of America

Abbreviation	LSA
Formation	December 28, 1924 (1924-12-28)
Region	United States
Membership	3500
President	Alice Harris
Vice-President	Larry Hyman
Secretary-Treasurer	Patrick Farrell
Slogan	Advancing the Scientific Study of Language
Website	www.linguisticsociety.org

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded at the end of 1924 in New York City, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The Society publishes two scholarly journals, Language and the open access journal Semantics and Pragmatics. Its annual meetings, held every winter, foster discussion amongst its members through the presentation of peer-reviewed research, as well as conducting official business of the Society. Since 1928, the LSA has offered training to linguists through courses held at its biennial Linguistic Institutes held in the summer. The LSA and its 3,500 members work to raise awareness of linguistic issues with the public and contributes to policy debates on issues including bilingual education and the preservation of endangered languages.

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was founded on 28 December 1924, when about 75 linguists met to select officers, ratify a constitution, and present papers in order to facilitate communication within the field of linguistics. The foundational members included 31 women, most of whom worked as educators rather than as scholars at research institutions. By 1935, half of the female foundational members had left the society—a rate similar to that of male members—largely due to the professionalization of the field of linguistics that disproportionately affected women as most worked outside of academia.

Before the foundation of the LSA, a number of other similar societies existed including the American Philological Society and the Modern Language Association, and with the publication of Sapir's Language and Saussure's Course in General Linguistics in 1921 and 1922, the field of linguistics began to take shape as an independent discipline. Though an international discipline, the founders of the LSA had a growing feeling of an American linguistics different from the traditional European topics and methodologies popular at the time. One of the founding members, Leonard Bloomfield, explained the need for and establishment of the society so that the science of language, similar to but separate from other sciences, could build a "professional consciousness.