School of Oriental and African Study (SOAS)

It is significant that British linguistics began at the School of Oriental and African Studies. SOAS, a constituent college of the University of London, was founded in 1916 as a very belated response by Government to the need for an institute to study the languages and cultures of the Empire. SOAS, was (and is) full of people who had spent much of their careers in first-hand contact with various exotic languages and cultures, so that London linguistics was a brand of linguistics in which theorizing was controlled by healthy familiarity with the realities of alien tongues. (Firth himself thought and wrote a good deal about several Indian and some other languages.) The British Empire was to the London School what the American Indian was to American Descriptivists, in the sense that both groups were inoculated by quantities of unfamiliar data against the arid apriorism that disfigures some Continental and most Chomskyan linguistics.

There was a difference, though: the Americans were dealing largely with languages on the verge of extinction, which needed to be recorded for their scientific interest as a matter of urgency, while London linguists were typically dealing with languages that had plenty of speakers and which faced the task of evolving into efficient vehicles of communication for modern civilizations. This meant, on the one hand, that the practical aspect of the British linguistics tradition was reinforced: issues such as the creation of writing systems and national-language planning loomed large, and Firth taught courses on the sociology of language in the 1930's, long before that subject appeared on  the American linguistic agenda. Paradoxically, it also meant that London linguists were prepared to spend their time on relatively abstruse theorizing based on limited areas of data; they did not fell the same pressure as the Americans to get the raw facts down before it was too late. Hindustani with its eighty million or more speakers was not going to be lost to science because one spent a year or two polishing and re-polishing one's elegant abstract analysis of six of its irregular verbs. Supporters and critics alike agree that Firth's own work suffers by being too fragmentary and programmatic; few attempts at complete descriptions of language emerged from London School.