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Linguistic Society of America

American learned society

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  • 5 chapters

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History

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was founded on 28 December 1924, when about 75 linguists met to select officers, ratify a constitution, and present papers in order to facilitate communication within the field of linguistics. The foundational members included 31 women, most of whom worked as educators rather than as scholars at research institutions. By 1935, half of the female foundational members had left the society—a rate similar to that of male members—largely due to the professionalization of the field of linguistics that disproportionately affected women as most worked outside of academia.

Before the foundation of the LSA, a number of other similar societies existed, including the American Philological Society and the Modern Language Association, and with the publication of Sapir's Language and Saussure's Course in General Linguistics in 1921 and 1922, the field of linguistics began to take shape as an independent discipline. Though an international discipline, the founders of the LSA had a growing feeling of an American linguistics different from the traditional European topics and methodologies popular at the time. One of the founding members, Leonard Bloomfield, explained the need for and establishment of the society so that the science of language, similar to but separate from other sciences, could build a "professional consciousness.

From the start the LSA focused on establishing the science of linguistics, separate from other fields such as philology and anthropology. The founders were characterized as "scientific revolutionaries" as the early scholarship of the society's members contributed to the development of descriptive linguistics through their rejection of previous linguistic scholarship and methods in favor of new ones. Though when the views of the female members of the society are taken into account, the society was less revolutionary and more diverse in their scholarship.

The LSA published the first edition of its flagship journal, Language, in March 1925. That same year the society elected its first president, Hermann Collitz. In 1927, three years after the organization's founding, the LSA was admitted into the American Council of Learned Societies. The following year, one of the founding members of the LSA, Edgar Sturtevant, organized the first of the Linguistic Institutes which the LSA still holds biennially.

As the LSA grew, it began to take on a larger role outside of the professional sphere. During World War II, the LSA helped the United States government with language training programs through its Linguistic Institutes. After the longtime Secretary-Treasurer Archibald Hill retired from his position in 1969, the LSA made large changes to its organizational structure to better accommodate its new and growing role. The responsibilities of the secretary-treasurer were expanded and the LSA established a secretariat in Washington, D.C., in order to act as a liaison between the members, federal government, and other professional organizations. In 1981, the LSA and nine other professional organizations founded the Consortium of Social Science Associations in order to advocate for the governmental support of social science research.

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