Written Language - Written Language Vs. Spoken Language

Written Language Vs. Spoken Language

Written languages change more slowly than corresponding spoken languages. When one or more registers of a language come to be strongly divergent from spoken language, the resulting situation is called diglossia. However, such diglossia is often considered as one language, between literary language and other registers, especially if the writing system reflects its pronunciation.

Native readers and writers of English are often unaware that the complexities of English spelling make written English a somewhat artificial construct. The traditional spelling of English, at least for inherited words, preserves a late Middle English phonology that is no one's speech dialect. The artificial preservation of this much earlier form of the language in writing might make much of what we write intelligible to Chaucer (1343–1400), even if we could not understand his speech.

Written Language refers to communication in its written form - most commonly in the forms of reading and writing. However we are in a need for oral language; speaking and listening skills are acquired naturally by young children remarkably without the need for having to teach them. Language in its written form has become a process that is required in our oral language rules and must be clearly taught. There are many languages in our world that exist, but do not have a written form.

Read more about this topic:  Written Language

Famous quotes containing the words written, language and/or spoken:

    I have since written what no tide
    Shall ever wash away, what men
    Unborn shall read o’er ocean wide
    And find Ianthe’s name agen.
    Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)

    The language of the younger generation ... has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.
    Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916)

    Ah love is bitter and sweet,
    but which is more sweet
    the bitterness or the sweetness,
    none has spoken it.
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)