The London School

England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an unusually long history. Linguistic description becomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when it evolves a standard or ‘official’ language for itself out of the welter of diverse and conflicting local usages normally found in any territory that has been settled for a considerable time. England was already developing a recognized standard language by the eleventh century. Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet (1845-192). He was the greatest of the few historical linguists whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century to rival the burgeoning of historical linguistics in Germany. Sweet based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the workings of the vocal organs.

Sweet’s phonetics was practical as well as academic; he was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform. Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones (1881-1967), who took the subject up as a hobby, suggested to the authorities of University College, London, that they ought to consider teaching the phonetics of French. Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech-sound. Thanks to the traditions established by Sweet and Jones, the ‘ear-training’ aspect of phonetics plays a large part in university courses in linguistics in Britain, and British linguistic research tends to be informed by meticulous attention to phonetic detail.

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth (1890-1960). In 1938 he moved to the linguistics department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, where in 1944 he became the first Professor of General Linguistics in Great Britain. Until quite recently, the majority of university teachers of linguistics in Britain were people who had trained under Firth’s aegis and whose work reflected his ideas, so that, although linguistics eventually began to flourish in a number of other locations, the name ‘London School’ is quite appropriate for the distinctively British approach to the subject. London linguists were typically dealing with languages that had plenty of speakers and which faced the task of evolving into efficient vehicles of communication for modern civilization. It also meant that London linguists were prepared to spend their time on relatively abstruse theorizing based on limited areas of data. Firth’s own theorizing concerned mainly phonology and semantics.

Whether the potential contributions of the London School will succeed in finding a permanent place in the international pool of linguistic scholarship is another matter. London and other universities in Britain and the Commonwealth still contain scholars working within the Firthian tradition, but by now these are outnumbered, or at least outpublished, by a later, thoroughly Chomskyanized generation.