Prague Linguistic Circle

The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle was an influential group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation during the years 1928–1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years.

The Prague School has had a significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. Following the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian — later Hallidean — linguistics). American scholar Dell Hymes cites his 1962 paper, "The Ethnography of Speaking," as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology. The Prague structuralists also had a significant influence on structuralist film theory, especially through the introduction of the ostensive sign.

The Prague linguistic circle included the Russian émigrés Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Sergei Karcevskiy, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský. The instigator of the circle, and its first president until his death in 1945, was the Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius.

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