Antoine Meillet

Antoine Meillet was a French linguist and one of the most influential figures in comparative and historical Indo-European linguistics in the early twentieth century. A student of Ferdinand de Saussure, Meillet extended the comparative method to trace the historical relationships among the Indo-European languages and to reconstruct aspects of their common ancestor, while also emphasizing that language change should be studied in relation to the social conditions of the communities that speak a language. He trained a generation of linguists at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the College de France in Paris, and his 1903 introduction to comparative Indo-European grammar became a standard reference work in the field for decades. Meillet's insistence on linking linguistic change to social history helped shape the later development of sociolinguistics as a distinct area of study.