An Introduction to Language and Linguistics

Chapter preview

As preceding chapters have shown, a fundamental characteristic of language is that it varies; different speech communities develop different languages, and different groups within those speech communities develop their own dialects. Speech communities also vary their use of their language to serve different purposes and different situations. People speak to friends differently than they speak to their bosses. People use different language in a church versus in a bar. Someone giving a report at work speaks differently than that same person telling a joke at a party. And when they write, people use language in different ways than when they speak. Different ways of using language to meet the communicative and social needs of different situations are called registers.

Writing is perhaps the clearest example of the adaptation of language to serve different purposes and situations, so we will examine the different writing systems of the world and how they developed. Describing the different kinds of writing systems with examples from three East Asian languages and Arabic, we’ll show how each system is suited to its spoken language and its culture. Then we’ll trace the history of writing from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Latin alphabet, a story which demonstrates the two-way relationship between writing and the development of human culture. Finally, we’ll take a look at the role that writing has played in more recent European history.