The concepts were theorized by the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of general linguistics in
Geneva from 1896 to 1911, and appeared in writing in his posthumous
Course in General Linguistics published in 1916. Saussure's teachers in
historical-comparative and
reconstructive linguistics such as
Georg Curtius advocated the
neo-grammarian manifesto according to which linguistic change is based on absolute laws. Thus, it was argued that ancient languages without surviving data could be reconstructed limitlessly after the discovery of such laws. In contradiction to his predecessors, Saussure demonstrated with multiple examples in his
Course that such alleged laws are too unreliable to allow reconstructions far beyond the empirical data. Therefore, in Saussure's view, language change (diachrony) does not form a system. By contrast, each synchronic stage is held together by a systemic equilibrium based on the interconnectedness of meaning and form. To understand why a language has the forms it has at a given stage, both the diachronic and the synchronic dimension must be considered. Saussure likewise rejected the idea of the
Darwinian linguists August Schleicher and
Max Müller, who considered languages as living organisms arguing that linguistics belongs to
life sciences. Saussure illustrates the historical development of languages by way of his distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic perspective employing a metaphor of
moving pictures. Even though objects on film appear to be moving, at a closer inspection, this turns out to be an illusion because each picture is static ('synchronic') and there is nothing between the pictures except a lifeless frame. In a similar manner, the "life" of language—simply
language change—consists of a series of static points, which are physically independent of the previous stage. In such a context, Saussure warns against the confusion of synchrony and diachrony expressing his concern that these could not be studied simultaneously. Following the posthumous publication of Saussure's
Course, the separation of synchronic and diachronic linguistics became controversial and was rejected by structural linguists including
Roman Jakobson and
André Martinet, but was well-received by the
generative grammarians, who considered Saussure's statement as an overall rejection of the historical-comparative method. In American linguistics, Saussure became regarded as an opponent of historical linguistics. In 1979,
Joseph Greenberg stated :"One of the major developments of the last decade or so in linguistics has been a revived and apparently still expanding interest in historical linguistics (..) As a minimum, the strict separation of synchronic and diachronic studies—envisaged by Saussure, but never absolute in practice—is now widely rejected." By contrast,
Mark Aronoff argues that Saussure rooted linguistic theory in synchronic states rather than diachrony breaking a 19th-century tradition of
evolutionary explanation in linguistics. A dualistic opposition between synchrony and diachrony has been carried over into
philosophy and
sociology, for instance by
Roland Barthes and
Jean-Paul Sartre.
Jacques Lacan also used it for
psychoanalysis. Prior to de Saussure, many similar concepts were also developed independently by Polish linguists
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and
Mikołaj Kruszewski of the
Kazan School, who used the terms
statics and
dynamics of language. In 1970
Eugenio Coșeriu, revisiting
De Saussure's synchrony and diachrony distinction in the description of language, coined the terms
diatopic,
diastratic and
diaphasic to describe
linguistic variation. == References ==