A use of language which has its own internal rule system or sense regime. Most often language games take the form of a conscious mutation of an already existing language, such as the children’s language Pig Latin, but it may also consist of entirely new words, such as one finds in certain highly technical jargons. Viennese philosopher Wittgenstein, Ludwig conceived the notion of language games to explain the origin of language as an arbitrary and game-like association between certain sounds and particular objects and actions. French philosopher Lyotard, Jean-François uses the notion of language games to describe the conditions under which a differend may arise: if the notion of a wrong in one language game, that of the victim, cannot be translated into the language game of another, say that of the courts, then it is impossible for that wrong to be heard. The proliferation of language games and the corresponding impossibility of an authentic politics is for Lyotard one of the characteristics of postmodernism. langue and parole A binary pair introduced by Saussure, Ferdinand de distinguishing between, on the one hand, the set of possible ways of making meaning contained by any one language and, on the other hand, its various specific, concrete instantiations. In learning another language, our primary goal must be to gain an appreciation of its langue because only then will we be able to make sense of it, which for Saussure would mean being able to manipulate it and create new meanings. If we simply build up a vocabulary of foreign words we will never understand a language in the way a native speaker of that particular language does because we lack an appreciation of the rules of combination of those words that comprise that language’s langue. The terms are generally left in the original French because of the difficulty of their translation; where they are translated they are rendered as ‘language’ and ‘speech’ which is misleading to the extent that it obscures the fact that for Saussure langue refers to the internal structure of a language, not language itself, for which he used the term langage. For Saussure, langue is the system or machine of language developed in the collective unconscious of a specific community of language users. In contrast, parole is the event of language. This distinction is one of the cornerstones of structuralism. Further Reading: F. Jameson The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972). J. Sturrock Structuralism (1986).