UGC-NET (NTA) Linguistics, June-2022

Ferdinand de Saussure may in many respects be considered the founder of the modern science of language. He too was the first to call for a structural approach to language, i.e., a scientific description of language in terms of relations between units, irrespective of any properties which may be displayed by these units but which are not relevant to the relations or deducible from the relations.
Thus, Saussure would have it that the sounds of a spoken language, or the characters of a written language, should be described, not primarily in terms of phonetics or of graphiology, respectively, but in terms of mutual relations only, and, similarly, the units of the linguistic content (the units of meaning) should be described primarily not in terms of semantics but in terms of mutual relations only.
According to Saussure, it would be erroneous to consider philology as a mere aggregate of physical, physiological, and acoustic descriptions of speech sounds, and of investigations into the meanings of words, and we may add, of psychological interpretations of such sounds and meanings. On the contrary, the real units of language are not sounds, or written characters or meanings: the real units of language are the relata which these sounds, characters, and meanings represent.
The main thing is not the sounds, characters, and meanings as such, but their mutual relations within the chain of speech and within the paradigms of grammar. These relations make up the system of a language, and it is this interior system which is characteristic of one language as opposed. to other languages, whereas the representation by sounds, characters, and meanings is irrelevant to the system and may be changed without affecting the system.
What is a structural approach to language?

Language endangerment may be the result of external forces such as military, economic, religious, cultural or educational subjugation, or it may be caused by internal forces, such as a community's negative attitude towards its own language. Internal pressures often have their source in external ones, and both halt the intergenerational transmission of linguistic and cultural traditions.
Many indigenous peoples, associating their disadvantaged social position with their culture, have come to believe that their languages are not worth retaining. They abandon their languages and cultures in hopes of overcoming discrimination, to secure a livelihood and enhance social mobility or to assimilate to the global marketplace. The extinction of any language results in the irrecoverable loss of unique cultural, historical and ecological knowledge.
Each language is a unique expression of the human experience of the world. Thus, the knowledge of any single language may be the key to answering fundamental questions in the future. Every time a language dies, we have less evidence for understanding patterns in the structure and function of human language, human prehistory and the maintenance of the world's diverse ecosystems. Above all, speakers of these languages may experience the loss of their language as a loss of their original ethnic and cultural identity (Bernard 1992, Hale 1998).
Raising awareness about language loss and language diversity will only be successful when meaningful contemporary roles for minority languages can be established for the requirements of modern life within the community as well as in national and international contexts. Meaningful contemporary roles include tiie use of these languages in everyday life, commerce, education, writing, the arts and/or the media. Economic and political support by both local communities and national governments are needed to establish such roles.
The internal force that is often responsible for language endangerment