He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the members of the L'Année sociologique.

In 1921, with the help of linguists Paul Boyer and André Mazon [fr], he founded the Revue des études slaves.

He is notable for having coined and formalized the concept of grammaticalisation[1] (influential but still controversial today) to denote what he viewed as the process of innovation by which autonomous words ended up as "grammatical agents".

[5] From Parry's resulting research in Bosnia, the records of which are now housed at Harvard University, he and his student Albert Lord revolutionized Homeric scholarship.

In his book La Ricerca della Lingua Perfetta nella Cultura Europea ('The Pursuit of the Perfect Language in the Culture of Europe'), Umberto Eco cites Meillet as saying: "Any kind of theoretical discussion is useless, Esperanto is functioning".