langue

n.
Language viewed as a system including vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation of a particular community.

[French, from Old French. See language.]

noun

A system of terms used by a people sharing a history and culture: dialect, language, speech, tongue, vernacular. See words.

langue [lahng], the French word for language or tongue, which has had a special sense in linguistics since the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in his Cours de linguistique générale (1915), distinguished langue from parole. In this sense, langue refers to the rules and conventions of a given language—its phonological distinctions, its permitted grammatical combinations of elements, etc.—whereas parole (‘speech’) refers to the sphere of actual linguistic events, i.e. utterances. Saussure proposed that because langue underlies and makes possible the infinitely varied forms of parole, it should be the primary object of linguistic science. The langue/parole distinction is one of the theoretical bases of structuralism, although some structuralist writings have encouraged a confusion between langue (the rules of a specific language) and Saussure's distinct third term langage (the concept ‘language’ as such): the power attributed to ‘Language’ in this tradition has little to do with Saussure's notion of langue, and owes more to abstract conceptions of langage as a universal ‘system’.