Sociolinguistics

Langue and parole: system and data

Two complementary approaches are needed when we study language: we need to be aware of the raw data - what people actually say; and also aware of the underlying systems - the grammar, the sound system, how to classify words and expressions. The system can be described as a more or less abstract structure, whereas the things people say are best analysed as ways of behaving, subject to all the pressures of the moment and varying according to the situations in which people find themselves and the sort of people they are.

Language in use, the data, was labelled parole by Saussure and contrasted with the system, langue. Parole is the sum of all the variations used in a language, whether caused by chance or by (conscious or unconscious) choice, so some of the individual preferences, differences of pronunciation and selection of terms will correlate with a speaker's individuality and personality, his memory and physical capacities, his knowledge and experience, expertise in language use; others with aspects of the situations he finds himself in and the people he converses with.

Chomsky's term for this raw data was performance; his term for langue was competence. The competence of an idealised speaker/hearer is a systematised abstraction from the data, reducing them to order in grammatical, lexical, phonetic or phonemic terms and imposing both constraints and explanatory structures on real usage, rejecting some items as being ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘irrelevant’ to the analysis.