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French version (to the English version: • What is language, and what is it?) On the occasion of the 19th International Congress of Linguists taking place in Geneva, American linguist Noam Chomsky gave a lecture on Thursday, July 25 at Uni Dufour. Known for his political activism and his best-selling books on US foreign policy and the functioning of the media, Noam Chomsky revolutionized the way his discipline is approached. His doctoral thesis, presented in 1955 when he was not yet 30 years old, would later be considered the most important contribution to the field of theoretical linguistics of the 20th century. Holder of some thirty honorary doctorates and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky developed theses which, although often contested, had a major influence, beyond linguistics, on the emergence of cognitive sciences, but also in fields that were a priori more distant. His generative model was thus used by the 1984 Nobel Prize winner for medicine, Niels Jerne, to explain the human immune system.