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:
“Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decypher even fragments of their meaning.”
—Lydia M. Child (1802–1880)
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)