Where Is the Language System? Revisiting Saussure in Light of Roy Harris

Language Names and Linguistic Systems

In the chapter “Linguistics after Saussure” in The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics, Roy Harris draws attention to a persistent difficulty in the Saussurean conception of language. Linguistics claims to describe systems of signs, yet the entities to which such systems are usually attached—languages like “English,” “French,” or “Latin”—are not themselves clearly bounded objects. The everyday practice of naming languages sits uneasily beside the theoretical ambition to identify coherent linguistic systems.

Harris formulates the problem in stark terms. The systems linguists analyze rarely align neatly with the language labels circulating in social life. As he observes:

“The obvious difficulty (both for Saussure and for his successors) was that such systems do not unambiguously correspond to the commonly accepted language-names (such as ‘English’, ‘French’, ‘Latin’, etc.). So there is no guarantee that everything called, say, ‘English’ belongs to the same linguistic system” (Harris, 2016).

The observation is difficult to dispute. Under the umbrella of what is commonly called “English,” one finds regional dialects, sociolects, shifting registers, and hybrid forms that blur the boundaries between linguistic traditions. Speakers move across these varieties with considerable flexibility, adjusting pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntactic patterns according to context. The label remains stable while the linguistic practices it gathers together remain anything but.

From this perspective, the expectation that a language name corresponds to a single coherent system appears questionable. Even self-identification as a speaker of a language provides little theoretical clarity. Communities overlap, speakers migrate between varieties, and linguistic practices intermingle. If the concept of langue is meant to designate an underlying system shared by speakers, Harris asks, where exactly is that system to be found?

Langue and the Speech Community

The force of this question becomes clearer once we return to Ferdinand de Saussure’s own formulation of the concept. In the Course in General Linguistics, Saussure does not define language primarily in terms of named entities such as “French” or “German.” Instead, he introduces langue as the collective system of conventions that enables communication within a speech community. Language, in this sense, is “a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions adopted by the social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty” (Saussure, 1916/2011).

This formulation shifts attention away from language names and toward the shared code that speakers internalize through participation in a community. The system exists insofar as it is collectively maintained and tacitly known by those who use it. Nothing in this definition requires that the boundaries of the system coincide with the labels by which languages are commonly identified. Indeed, Saussure’s broader work in historical linguistics suggests a keen awareness that linguistic practices diverge, overlap, and evolve across time and space.

Once this point is acknowledged, the tension highlighted by Harris begins to look somewhat different. The difficulty does not arise because Saussure assumed that language names correspond to perfectly unified systems. Rather, it emerges when the linguist attempts to map theoretical constructs onto social categories that were never designed to function as precise analytical units.

Two Perspectives on Language

The contrast becomes particularly visible if one distinguishes between two perspectives on language: that of the speaker and that of the linguist.

From the standpoint of speakers within a linguistic community, the existence of a system is rarely in doubt. Communication proceeds smoothly because participants share a set of conventions that allows them to recognize words, identify grammatical relations, and interpret utterances. For those who inhabit the system, it simply appears as the language they know.

The limits of that system become visible only when communication fails. Saussure illustrates this point by considering what happens when one hears a language one does not understand. The speech stream does not present itself as an organized structure of meaningful units but rather as an undifferentiated sequence of sounds. Without access to the relevant system, the listener cannot segment the acoustic flow into recognizable elements. Words, grammatical relations, and semantic distinctions remain invisible.

From within the community, then, the system is self-evident. It is the background condition that makes linguistic meaning possible.

The situation changes when the perspective shifts to that of the linguist. The analyst surveys many communities simultaneously and groups their linguistic practices under large classificatory labels such as “English,” “Spanish,” or “French.” Once these categories are established, the natural question arises: what is the system underlying the entity called “English”?

It is at this stage that the problem Harris identifies becomes unavoidable. The label “English” gathers together a wide range of linguistic practices that do not necessarily share a single, clearly bounded structure. The expectation that there must nevertheless be one identifiable system corresponding to the name generates the theoretical tension.

Language Names and Linguistic Reality

Seen in this light, Harris’s critique points less to an internal inconsistency in Saussure’s framework than to a shift in epistemological perspective. Saussure’s concept of langue describes the system internal to a community of speakers. Harris approaches language from the standpoint of the external observer who attempts to classify and compare many such communities at once. What appears problematic from this broader vantage point may not correspond to any difficulty in the conceptual apparatus Saussure originally proposed.

The distinction matters because it reminds us that language names belong primarily to the social world of classification and identity. Linguistic systems, by contrast, emerge from the shared practices that enable communication within particular groups of speakers. The two domains overlap, but they do not coincide.

Harris’s intervention therefore performs a valuable service. By questioning the relationship between language names and linguistic systems, it exposes a conceptual habit that often goes unnoticed in linguistic theory: the tendency to treat socially established labels as if they referred to clearly bounded analytical objects. Saussure’s own conception of langue suggests a more modest picture, one in which linguistic systems are tied to communities rather than to names.

If so, the question “What system corresponds to English?” may already presuppose more unity than linguistic reality can sustain. What exists instead are multiple communities whose shared conventions make communication possible, even when outsiders gather those practices under a single familiar label.

 References

Harris, R. (2016). Linguistics after Saussure. In P. Cobley (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics. Routledge.

Saussure, F. de. (2011). Course in General Linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1916)