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.

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.

The basic theoretical framework, called Glossematics was laid out in Hjelmslevs two main works: "Prolegomena to a theory of Language" and "résumé of a theory of Language."

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.

Louis Hjelmslev 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

Hjelmslev published his first paper at the age of 25. 

His first major book, Principes de grammaire générale, which he finished in 1928, is an invaluable source for anyone interested in Hjelmslev's work. During the 1930s Hjelmslev wrote another book, La catégorie des cas, which was a major contribution to linguistics. In this book, Hjelmslev analysed the general category of case in detail, providing ample empirical material supporting his hypotheses. He accepted language as a system of signs, from the point of view of language use.

Hjelmslev's sign model is a development of Saussure's bilateral sign model. Saussure considered a sign as having two sides, signifier and signified, and also distinguished between form and substance.

In one of his last works, “Some Reflexions on Practice and Theory in Structural Semantics” (1961), Hjelmslev even admits that the entire analysis might end up with indefinables of simple behavior situations such as, “I am here, you are there” elements that constitute language as a process of enunciation and not as an imminent structure.