In 1862 Baudouin de Courtenay entered the "Main School," a predecessor of the University of Warsaw.
In 1866 he graduated from its historical and philological faculty and won a scholarship of the Russian Imperial Ministry of Education. Leaving Poland, he studied at various foreign universities, including those of Prague, Jena and Berlin. In 1870 he received a doctorate from the University of Leipzig for his Polish-language dissertation On the Old Polish Language Prior to the 14th Century.
His work had a major impact on 20th century linguistic theory, and it served as a foundation for several schools of phonology. He was an early champion of synchronic linguistics, the study of contemporary spoken languages, which he developed contemporaneously with the structuralist linguistic theory of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Among the most notable of his achievements is the distinction between statics and dynamics of languages and between a language, that is, an abstract group of elements, and speech (its implementation by individuals). Together with his students Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba, he also shaped the modern usage of the term phoneme, which had been coined in 1873 by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes.
He was born in Radzymin, ...