The Copenhagen school (linguistics)

The Copenhagen School, officially the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (French: Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague), is a group of scholars dedicated to the study of linguistics. It was founded by Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) and Viggo Brøndal (1887–1942). In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and the Prague School. In the late 20th and early 21st century the Copenhagen school has turned from a purely structural approach to linguistics to a functionalist one, Danish functional grammar, which nonetheless incorporates many insights from the founders.

The Copenhagen School of Linguistics evolved around Louis Hjelmslev and his developing theory of language, glossematics. Together with Viggo Brøndal he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague a group of linguists based on the model of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Within the circle the ideas of Brøndal and Hjelmslev were not always compatible. Hjelmslev’s more formalist approach attracted a group of followers, principal among them Hans Jørgen Uldall and Eli Fischer Jørgensen, who would strive to apply Hjelmslev's abstract ideas of the nature of language to analyses of actual linguistic data.

Hjelmslev’s objective was to establish a framework for understanding communication as a formal system, and an important part of this was the development of precise terminology to describe the different parts of linguistic systems and their interrelatedness. The basic theoretical framework, called “Glossematics” was laid out in Hjelmslev’s two main works: Prolegomena to a theory of Language and Résumé of a theory of Language. However, since Hjelmslev's death in 1965 left his theories mostly on the programmatic level, the group that had formed around Hjelmslev and his glossematic theory dispersed—while the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle continued to exist, it was not really a "school" united by a common theoretical perspectives.

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