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Unit 1: Introduction to Linguistics: Its Aspects

images in the minds of individuals. It is not to be confused with human speech (language) of Notes
which it is only a definite part, though certainly an essential one.’ It is both a social product of the
faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social
body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty. Langue, therefore, is a corporate, social
phenomenon. It is homogeneous whereas language is heterogenous. It is concrete and we can study
it. It is a system of linguistic signs which are not abstract but real entities, tangible to be reduced
to conventional, written symbols. Putting it loosely langue is grammar+vocabulary+pronunciation,
system of a community. As stated by Hjelmslev, the term langue as used by Saussure, includes
three different concepts:
1. (the language scheme (the pure language form defined independently of its social realization
and physical manifestations);
2. the language norm (the material form defined by its social realization but independent of
particular manifestations);
3. the language custom (a set of customs accepted by a particular society and defined by observable
manifestations).
Ultimately, langue has to be related to parole which is the actual usage of individuals, which a
community manifests in its everyday speech, the actual, concrete act of speaking on the part of an
individual, the controlled or controllable psycho-physical activity. Parole is the set of all utterances
that have actually been produced, while langue is the set of all possible grammatical sentences in
the language. From this it follows that parole is a ‘personal, dynamic, social activity, which exists
at a particular time and place and in a particular situation as opposed to langue which, exists
apart from any particular manifestation in speech.’
La Parole
Parole is the only object available for direct observation to the linguist. Utterances are instances of
parole. The underlying structure in terms of which we produce them as speakers and understand
them as hearers, is the langue in question (Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, etc.) and is independent
of the physcial medium (or substance) in which it is realized. A langue, on the other hand, is not
spoken by anybody, but is a composite body of linguistic phenomena derived as it were from the
personal dialects (paroles) of all native speakers. The langue is in essence a social phenomenon,
having reality only as a social institution, it is, therefore, constant, supra-individualistic, and
generalized; the individual speaker can neither create it nor modify it easily and ordinarily, Ullmann
has tabulated the main differences between language and parole in the following manner:
Langue (language) Parole (speech)
Code Encoding of a message
Potential Actualized
Social Individual
Fixed Free
Slow-moving Ephemeral
Psychological Psycho-Physical
1.4.3 Competence and Performance
Noam Chomsky’s concept of competence and performance is some what similar to Saussure’s
concept of language and parole. Competence, according to Chomsky, is the native speaker’s
knowledge of his language, the system of rules he has mastered, his ability to produce and
understand a vast number of new sentences. Competence is the study of the system of rules,
performance is the study of actual sentences themselves, of the actual use of the language in real-
life situation. So the speaker’s knowledge of the structure of a language is his linguistic competence
and the way in which he uses it, is his linguistic performance.

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