Schleicher was educated at the University of Tübingen and Bonn and taught at the Charles University in Prague and the University of Jena. He began his career studying theology and Oriental languages, especially Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and Persian. Influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he formed the theory that a language is an organism, with periods of development, maturity and decline. In 1850, Schleicher completed a monograph systematically describing European languages, Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht . He explicitly represented languages as perfectly natural organisms that could most conveniently be described using terms drawn from biology: genus, species, and variety. Schleicher claimed that he himself had been convinced of the natural descent and competition of languages before he had read Darwin'sOrigin of Species. He invented a system of language classification that resembled a botanical taxonomy, tracing groups of related languages and arranging them in a genealogical tree. His model, the Stammbaumtheorie, was a major development in the study of Indo-European languages. He first introduced a graphic representation of a Stammbaum in an article published in 1853 entitled Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes. By the time of the publication of his Deutsche Sprache he had begun to use trees to illustrate language descent. Schleicher is commonly recognized as the first linguist to portray language evolution using the figure of a tree. Largely in reaction, Johannes Schmidt later proposed his 'Wave Theory' as an alternative model. For the most part, however, Darwin's ideas simply overlaid the fundamental features of Schleicher's prior evolutionary project, which derived from the work of those individuals immersed in German romanticism and idealism, especially Wilhelm von Humboldt and Hegel. Schleicher believed that languages pass through a life cycle, similar to that of living beings. They start out simpler than they will become. The state of primitive simplicity is followed by a period of growth, which eventually slows and gives way to a period of decay : Schleicher was an advocate of the polygenesis of languages. He reasoned as follows : Schleicher's ideas on polygenesis had long-lasting influence, both directly and via their adoption by the biologist Ernst Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel was a German evolutionist and zoologist known for proposing the gastraea hypothesis. In 1866, August Leskien, a pioneer of research into sound laws, began studying comparative linguistics under August Schleicher at the University of Jena.
Works
Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen. / Zur vergleichenden Sprachgeschichte. Bonn, H. B. Koenig
Linguistische Untersuchungen. Part 2: Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht. Bonn, H. B. Koenig ; new ed. by Konrad Koerner, Amsterdam, John Benjamins
Formenlehre der kirchenslawischen Sprache.
Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes.Allgemeine Zeitung fuer Wissenschaft und Literatur
Handbuch der litauischen Sprache. Weimar, H. Boehlau
Litauische Maerchen, Sprichworte, Raetsel und Lieder. Weimar, H. Boehlau
Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language. London, J. C. Hotten
A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin Languages, translated from the third German edition by Herbert Bendall. London: Trübner and Co
Laut- und Formenlehre der polabischen Sprache. reprinted by Saendig Reprint Verlag H. R. Wohlwend,
Sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen. reprinted by Minerva GmbH, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag,
Die Formenlehre der kirchenslavischen Sprache erklaerend und vergleichend dargestellt. Reprint by H. Buske Verlag, Hamburg,
