This paper will examine criticism of the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo towards Saussure’s semiotics and “Saussurean” structuralism. In this regard it will be analysed an article devoted to language origins published by Thảo between 1974 and 1974. In detail, Thảo’s criticism towards Saussure was deeply influenced by dialectical materialism and cannot be detached from a more general reflection on Husserl’s phenomenology. In the same period, Thảo published his Investigations into the Origins of Language and Consciousness (1973) in which he applied his new semiotic mode to a description of language origins.