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.
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Famous quotes containing the words written, language and/or spoken:
““When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one—but I’m grown up now,” she added in a sorrowful tone: “At least there’s no room to grow up any more here.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“First it must be known that only a spoken word or a conventional sign is an equivocal or univocal term; therefore a mental content or concept is, strictly speaking, neither equivocal nor univocal.”
—William of Occam (c. 1285–1349)