We have a tight summary of this book elsewhere — the “overview”. This piece takes it slower, with everyday examples. It runs long, so it is split in two. Part 1 is about what language is, and what a sign is. Part 2 covers how the system works and how it changes.
What kind of book this is
The Course in General Linguistics is not a book Saussure wrote. It was rebuilt after his death by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from notes taken by people who attended his three lecture series at the University of Geneva (1907–1911), and published in 1916. So the text is a reconstruction of his teaching — something the editors say plainly in their preface.
Why does the book matter? Until then, the study of language was mostly history: comparing older and newer forms, reconstructing ancestral languages. The question “but what is language?” was rarely asked. Saussure asked it.
First, sort out three words: langage / langue / parole
When we say “language” we are really pointing at several things at once: the movements of the mouth and tongue, sound waves, meaning in the head, social habit, writing. Saussure calls this heterogeneous whole langage. As it stands, it cannot be the object of a science — it is too many-sided to hold together.
So he pulls two things out of it.
- langue (the language system): the knowledge a community shares — a kind of “dictionary + grammar” in the head, roughly the same in every member. No individual can create or change it. This is the true object of linguistics.
- parole (speaking): the act of using that system — an individual, one-off, free act.
An analogy: langue is the rulebook of football; parole is any single play in an actual match. The rules are shared and no player can change them; the plays are unlimited and decided on the spot.
Semiology: language is “a kind of sign”
Langue is “a system of signs that express ideas.” If so, then writing, sign language, road signs, a military salute and ritual etiquette all belong to the same family.
Saussure names the study of these “signs in society” semiology (sémiologie), and makes linguistics one branch of it. But because language is the most complex and universal system of signs, it can serve as the master pattern for the whole field.
The point to hold onto: this is a declaration that language is to be seen not as a list of names for things in the world, but as a system.
What a sign is: two faces
The common mistake is “a word = a name stuck onto a thing.” Saussure rejects it. On the name-tag view, a finished concept would have to exist before the name — and it does not (more on this in Part 2).
A sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept (the signified) and a sound-image (the signifier). Both are mental. The “sound-image” is not the sound actually ringing in the air, but the felt sense of it in the head — which is why you can recite a poem silently.
The two faces are like the two sides of a sheet of paper: you cannot cut the front (concept) and leave the back (sound).
Principle I: the sign is arbitrary
There is no necessary bond between the concept “dog” and the sound sequence d-o-g. That is exactly why the sound differs from language to language — English dog, French chien, German Hund, Japanese inu.
“Arbitrary” does not mean “the speaker is free to choose” (that would contradict immutability, below). It means “unmotivated — there is no natural reason.”
- Isn’t onomatopoeia a counterexample? Words like bow-wow are few, differ across languages (French ouaoua), and undergo the same sound changes as other words over time. They are not at the centre of the system.
- Sign versus symbol. A symbol — scales for justice — has some natural fit (you could not swap the scales for a chariot). An arbitrary sign has none.
Principle II: sound unfolds in a line
The sound-image is auditory, so it can only be laid out in a line, in time. You cannot pronounce two sounds at once. It is the same as writing them left to right. A modest principle, but it is the ground for the “relations along the chain” that come up in Part 2.
Fixed, yet changing (immutability and mutability)
Immutability. When a generation receives its language, it receives a finished thing “inherited from the preceding period.” No individual — and no community as a whole — can decide “from today we call an ox by a different sound.” Four reasons:
- Because the sign is arbitrary, there is no ground for argument (no “this one is more reasonable”).
- The number of signs is enormous.
- The system is so complex that the people using it do not grasp its workings.
- Everyone uses it at all times, so collective inertia is very strong.
Saussure puts it this way: language is not “a contract everyone agreed to,” but “something that is tolerated rather than consented to.”
Mutability. And yet, over centuries, language slowly changes — and the change always shows up as a shift in the fit between concept and sound. Latin necare “kill” became French noyer “drown”: both the sound and the meaning have moved.
The key point: it is precisely because a sign keeps being handed on that it can drift. Continuity and change are two sides of one thing.
That is Part 1. In Part 2 we look at how the system we pulled out actually works — value, difference, synchrony, syntagmatic and associative relations — and how it changes: sound change, analogy, waves.
