The Geneva School was founded by Ferdinand de Saussure in Switzerland and focuses on structuralism linguistics. Saussure introduced key concepts including the distinction between langue (the language system) and parole (individual speech acts), the idea that the basic unit of language is the linguistic sign consisting of the signifier and signified, and the relationship between syntagmatic (chain) and paradigmatic (choice) relations. Saussure's work influenced many subsequent schools of linguistic theory and established structuralism as an approach to analyzing language.