Between 1907 and 1911 Ferdinand de Saussure gave three courses in general linguistics at the University of Geneva, which would practically, and in general terms, represent the birth of contemporary linguistics. Upon his death, Ch. Bally and A. Sechehave published the Course in General Linguistics (1916), based on the notes and notes of students, the basis of modern linguistic studies. It is here that Saussure defines key concepts for the first time, giving them a specific meaning, later endorsed by linguistics: for example: terms such as synchrony, diachrony, language, language, speech, sign, signified, signifier, linguistic unit, speech circuit, state of language, etc., are born in the General Linguistics Course to later pass into various hands that define them from their particular approaches: the Genevan stylistics of Bally, the phonologists and structuralists of the Prague school, psycholinguistics, the glossematics school, Chomsky, among other authors and currents. But, despite the difference that all schools maintain, the basis of his work stems from the General Linguistics Course, which affected all sectors of the human sciences: Saussure's thought represents, together with Freud's, one of the starting points of the current development of the sciences.

This edition incorporates in Mauro Armiño's notes the fruits of Saussure's work, which have provided criticism and rectifications ─supported by Saussure's handwritten notes or by comparing the students' notebooks─ to the text prepared by Ch. Bally and A. Sechehaye