The Birth of Applied Linguistics: The Anglo-Scandinavian school as ‘discourse community’

The major claim of this article is that there is an independent and clearly defined chapter in the development of linguistics, beginning in the 1880s, which represents the birth of modern applied linguistics, and which has been overlooked in linguistic historiography because of the comparative marginalisation of applied linguistics in the literature. This is the Anglo-Scandinavian School, a phrase its members used to describe themselves. Pioneers within phonetics, these linguists applied their phonetic knowledge to a range of ‘real world’ language issues, notably language-teaching reform, orthographic reform, language planning, and the study of the spoken language. As well as presenting the ideas of the Anglo-Scandinavian School and how they were developed, this article interrogates the notion of a school in intellectual history and proposes that it may in fact be more fruitful to view intellectual history in terms of discourse communities.