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How did Noam Chomsky distinguish linguistic competence from linguistic performance?

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Ferdinand de Saussure seated in a formal pose, wearing a dark suit with a vest and sporting a thick mustache, circa 1900. — Linguistics Much of the foundation of 20th-century sociolinguistics was created by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913).

Noam Chomsky distinguished between linguistic competence and linguistic performance to clarify the focus of linguistic study. He argued that linguistics should be concerned with a speaker's linguistic competence—their creative, internal knowledge of language—rather than their linguistic performance, which refers to the actual utterances they produce.1

This distinction was central to Chomsky’s "mentalistic" theory of language. By prioritizing competence, Chomsky shifted the field away from the post-Bloomfieldian structuralist concern with "discovery procedures" for analyzing speech data. Instead, he proposed that the goal of linguistics should be to formulate precise, formal theories that describe the underlying system of rules and principles that allow a speaker to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences.21

In this framework, performance is viewed as the observable, often imperfect, manifestation of that internal competence, influenced by various external factors. By focusing on competence, Chomsky sought to explain how individuals acquire their internal language, or "I-language," which serves as the foundation for human linguistic creativity.21