The Copenhagen school

The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague)", was a group of scholars dedicated to the study of structural linguistics founded by Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal. In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and thePrague School.

The Copenhagen School of Linguistics evolved around Louis Hjelmslev and his developing theory of language, glossematics. Together with Viggo Brødal he founded the Cercle Linguistique de  Copenhague a group of linguists based on the model of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and thePrague School.

Within the circle the ideas of Brøndal and Hjelmslev were not always compatible and Hjelmslevs more formalist approach attracted a group of followers, principal among them Hans Jørgen

Uldall and Eli Fischer Jørgensen, who would strive to apply Hjelmslevs abstract ideas of the

nature of language to analyses of actual linguistic data.

 In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and thePrague School.

In 1989 a group of members of the Copenhagen Linguistic circle inspired by the advances in

cognitive linguistics and the functionalist theories of Simon C. Dik founded the School of Danish

Functional Grammar aiming to combine the ideas of Hjelmslev and Brøndal, and other important

Danish linguists such as Paul Diderichsen and Otto Jespersen with modern functional linguistics.

Among the prominent members of this new generation of the Copenhagen School of Linguistics

were Peter Harder, Elisabeth Engberg Petersen, Frans Gregersen and Michael Fortescue, and 

the basic work of the school is "Danish Functional Grammar."

Louis Hjelmslev (October 3, 1899, Copenhagen – May 30, 1965, Copenhagen) was a Danish

linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an

academic family, Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris

(with a.o.Antoine Meillet and Joseph Vendryes).

žHis most well-known book, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse, or in English

translation, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, first published in 1943, critiques the

then-prevailing methodologies in linguistics as being descriptive, even anecdotal, and not

systematising. 

In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall

he developed a structural theory of language which he called glossematics, which developed the

semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is

characterized by a high degree of formalism, it is interested only in describing the formal

characteristics of language, and a high degree of logical rigour.

The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen

The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen was founded by Hjelmslev and a group of Danish

colleagues on September 24, 1931. Their main inspiration was the Prague Linguistic Circle,

which had been founded in 1926. It was, in the first place, a forum for discussion of theoretical

and methodological problems in linguistics. Initially, their interest lay mainly in developing an

alternative concept of the phoneme, but it later developed into a complete theory which was

coined glossematics, and was notably influenced by structuralism. Membership of the group

grew rapidly and a significant list of publications resulted, including an irregular series of larger

works under the name Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague.