The spoken language comes first

As we saw, thinking as a linguist does is like ‘releasing your inner child’. The following thought experiment will help get you started.

Try to forget you can read

Imagine what your world would be like if the written word were completely alien to you, and letters on the page no more than meaningless squiggles. Since you’re already reading, you’re probably finding that quite difficult, but this is of course a world you once knew, albeit when you were rather younger, probably before you started school.

For most adults, the written word takes up a significant proportion of our lives, whether we be reading a novel or daily newspaper, consulting an instruction manual, updating our Facebook status, catching up with the latest Twitter feed or texting a friend. If you’re at university or college, the written word soon becomes a prime focus: you read for a degree, which may well involve writing notes at lectures, where you may be given handouts, and you’ll be asked periodically to commit your thoughts to paper in the form of written essays. Writing is all around us, and modern life and the technological advances we take for granted would be impossible without it.

For linguists, however, writing takes second place to speech. Linguists are not uninterested in the written word: indeed, written material, particularly from earlier, pre-mass media eras, can offer important clues to language structure and linguistic change. Linguists working in the field of literary stylistics devote much of their time to the analysis of written texts. But generally linguists follow the principle of according primacy to speech, for a number of very good reasons:

1- All the world’s existing and extinct natural languages have had native speakers, but only a minority of them have ever had a written form.

While languages such as English, Mandarin, Hindi or Russian all have a long written tradition, many others, particularly those with small numbers of speakers, do not. Many African languages (e.g. Ewe, Wawa, Lugbara), Australian aboriginal languages (e.g. Dyirbal, Warlbiri, Guugu Yimidhirr) and native American languages (e.g. Arawakan, Hopi, Miskito) are not generally used for writing. We know little of the Gaulish language, which was spoken in what is now France before Roman occupation, because Gauls had no written system, and much of what we do know about the language comes from attempts to transcribe it using Latin characters, which were not designed for Gaulish.

Speakers of minority languages in unsympathetic nation states have often been taught that writing is acceptable only in the dominant or ‘official’ language, making it harder for their supporters to develop an accepted written standard if and when those same states later adopt more tolerant attitudes.

Cockney, Brummie, Geordie and Glaswegian have no written form and their speakers are dependent on the conventions of standard English for writing. Estimates put at around 6,000 the number of different languages spoken throughout the world, of which only a fraction have a written form: it would seem perverse – not to say ‘unscientific’ – for linguists to limit their inquiry to this group.

Dialect or language?

One might object here that Geordie, Cockney, Glaswegian and Brummie are dialects rather than languages. But this argument is a difficult one to sustain, as linguists are unable to find a watertight distinction between the two. One criterion might be mutual intelligibility: while we wouldn't expect to understand another language, we might well understand a different dialect of a language we do speak. But this criterion soon poses problems. The ‘dialects’ of Chinese (e.g. Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese) share a writing system but are mutually unintelligible, whereas the Scandinavian ‘languages’ Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are similar enough to be mutually comprehensible (sometimes with a little effort). The difference in practice is generally determined on socio-political rather than linguistic grounds: we tend to associate languages with nation states where they are spoken. Or, as cynics would have it: ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’. To avoid problems of this kind, linguists talk of language varieties.

2- Even where a writing system exists, not all adults acquire it.

Few advanced societies come close to Finland’s near 100 per cent literacy rate. But almost everyone learns to speak at least one language from a very early age, and children’s remarkable ability to make sense of oral language data is a puzzle which has long fascinated linguists, particularly those working within the generative paradigm.

3- Writing derives from speech (not the other way round), but is rarely a faithful or consistent representation of it.

In ideographic writing systems, for example Egyptian hieroglyphics or modern Chinese characters, the symbols used offer no clue to pronunciation, but even where alphabetic systems are employed, in which letters or graphemes purport to correspond to speech sounds, the relationship between writing and speech is a complex one.

Writing is so ubiquitous and familiar that we rarely even notice its conventions and oddities. If you learned to write in English, for example, you’ll expect a capital letter at the start of every sentence, but only occasionally elsewhere. so this Sentence Looks a bit odd. If your mother tongue is German, you’ll expect nouns to have initial capitals as well, e.g. das Tier (the animal). More significantly, there is often a mismatch between the way we write and the way we speak. Why, for example, is the h of hope pronounced, but not that of hour or honest? Why is night spelt with a gh sequence which isn’t pronounced? It is precisely these anomalies that are most obvious to us as children learning to write, and discovering that it’s far from a simple matter of converting speech sounds to letters.