Hjelmslev, Louis (1899—1966) Danish linguist. Born in Copenhagen, Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague, and Paris. In 1931 he helped found the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen, which modelled itself on (and in some respects against) the *Prague Linguistic Circle founded six years earlier by a small group of like-minded linguists that included such luminaries as Jakobson, Roman, Jan Mayakovsky, and Nikolai Trubetzkoy. Although his own work concentrated specifically on understanding language, aiming to develop a general theory of language, it has been expanded upon by others---particularly Barthes, Roland, Certeau, Michel de, Deleuze, Gilles, Eco, Umberto, Foucault, Michel, and Greimas, Algirdas Julien---to analyse a broad range of cultural phenomena. He called this general theory glossematics and intended it to be a kind of algebra of language which cut across what he saw as false distinctions between phonetics, morphology, syntax, lexicography, and semantics. The reality of language usage, Hjelmslev argued, necessitates a more complex system than traditional linguistics provides and in his best-known book, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse (1943), translated as Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1969), he set out to provide exactly that.