The Société de Linguistique de Paris (established 1864) is the editing body of the BSL (Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique) journal. Members of the society have included such well-known French linguists as Bréal, Saussure, Meillet, and Benveniste. Its first president was Antoine d'Abbadie.
In addition to its monthly meetings, the group holds a one-day conference each January dedicated to a particular topic. In 1997, it organised the Congrès International des Linguistes in Paris.
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, and contemporary language diversity. They may also study language acquisition as well as comparisons between human language and systems of animal communication (particularly other primates). Many argue for the close relation between the origins of language and the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the facts and implications of this connection.
The shortage of direct, empirical evidence has caused many scholars to regard the entire topic as unsuitable for serious study; in 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any existing or future debates on the subject, a prohibition which remained influential across much of the Western world until the late twentieth century. Various hypotheses have been developed on the emergence of language. While Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection had provoked a surge of speculation on the origin of language over a century and a half ago, the speculations had not resulted in a scientific consensus by 1996. Despite this, academic interest had returned to the topic by the early 1990s. Linguists, archaeologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have renewed the investigation into the origin of language with modern methods.