Kazan School

(in linguistics), a generally accepted but not entirely appropriate term used to designate a group of I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay’s students at the University of Kazan when he was a professor there (1875–83). In addition to Baudouin himself, N. V. Krushevskii, V. A. Bogoroditskii, S. K. Bulich, and A. I. Aleksandrov are considered members of the school.

The linguists of the Kazan school leaned toward neogram-marianism: they were characterized by their differentiation of oral and written forms of speech, analysis of the interrelations between the psychological and the physiological in language, differentiation of statics and dynamics (synchrony and dia-chrony), clearly expressed historicism, and attention to living languages. Baudouin himself subsequently diverged from the views of the Kazan school and took a position of linguistic sociologism, becoming in this sense a predecessor of F. de Saus-sure and A. Meillet. The Polish linguist K. J. Appel was the closest to Baudouin during his “Kazan period.” Some scholars consider the linguists of the Kazan school to be pioneers in contemporary structural linguistics (R. Jacobson).