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.

Hjelmslev's objective was to establish a framework for understanding communication as a formal system, and an important part of this was the development of precise terminology to describe the different parts of linguistic systems and their interrelatedness.

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.

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).

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.

Hjelmslev's importance in semiotics is a result of his rigorous attempt to turn Saussure's heterogenous and somewhat flexible structuralism into a theory of maximal explicitness and conceptual homogeneity on all levels. Moreover, his willingness to reconsider, albeit somewhat reluctantly, the formal limits of his theory sets the standard for any serious semiotic research.