The Prague Linguistic Circle was a group of linguists, philologists, literary theorists, and cultural analysts who began meeting on a regular basis in 1926 and thereafter exerted a widespread influence throughout the century. Its members defined the approach as jointly structuralist and functionalist, although the structuralist aspect of their project acquired greater international visibility. Their collective programme involved a dual focus both on the relations of structural contrast and resemblance that make up a given language or cultural artefact and – inseparably from that, they argued – on the role of those structures conceived in terms of their internal and (to some extent) external function.