I’mma say it one more time. Writing. Is not. Language.

I said it again because the response I normally get to this statement is “Yes it is!” or “Of course it is!” or sometimes “Get outta town, writing is the most important form of language!”

Y’all have some BIG feelings about this.

But writing is not, in fact, language.

Ok, so what IS language?

The short answer is that language is a symbolic system based on combining speech sounds and/or hand signs that humans use to communicate with the people in their communities. Knowing the system of sound/sign/meaning combinations used by our community enables us to understand and be understood by the people around us. H. sapiens have been using language for around 100 thousand years – we know this because sapiens have existed as a species for about that long. There’s serious debate in linguistics research about the extent to which our Neanderthal, Denisovan and H. erectus relatives might have used language, so we may still learn that humans have actually been using language for a million years or more!

What is writing, then?

Writing, on the other hand, is a system for transcribing language – and it’s a recent invention. It’s a technology that, according to historical evidence, communities in the Middle East developed 6 thousand-ish years ago, following the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic period, for record-keeping and communication over distance. Writing systems appear to have developed independently in Africa a little later for the same reasons. The prevailing thinking is that, with the explosion in agricultural production and the resulting development of cities, economic specialization and trade, it became necessary for people to devise systems for keeping track of their production, surpluses, trade transactions, and other economic stats because they were too complicated at that point for people to just remember them all.

Early writing systems were pictographic – the visual symbols of these systems represented meanings of words or ideas. Alphabetic systems – in which written shapes represent and transcribe speech sounds – are an even more recent invention, having developed starting around four-thousand years ago.

So there’s your historical language science lesson for today.

There’s a lot more to say about the distinction between language and writing. The tl;dr version is that in order to transcribe language, there has to first be a language to transcribe. All linguists will confirm that language precedes writing, both historically and developmentally.

Now, why is this distinction between language and transcription important in the modern world, where seemingly everything revolves around the written word and reading at grade-level is considered the ultimate indicator of academic potential?

Our national obsession with “literacy”

If your school experience growing up was like mine, you probably got the message early that communication didn’t really “count” unless it was written down and that the ability to comprehend and produce written material was the key to success. You probably only heard about speech sounds in the context of learning which letters “say” them, and didn’t spend much time exploring how and where we produce sounds in our mouths and throats. Side note: letters don’t “say” sounds; letters are pictures…pictures don’t talk. You probably learned about writing contractions with apostrophes, but heard little if anything about dialects that drop the linking verb in instances where we would contract it in standardized academic English. You might have discussed the nuances of written words in literature, but probably didn’t hear about tools and frameworks for analyzing semantics in the communication you heard around you. And you probably didn’t get much instruction in the patterns and norms of social communication, unless you violated them and got scolded for it.

The primacy of the written word has long been taken for granted in education, so much so that we rarely question it. And not just any written word – when we extol the virtues of literacy in US education, we’re not celebrating refugee kids from Ukraine who write compelling personal narratives in Cyrillic, or Korean-American students reading advanced texts in Hangul, or students from the Middle East creating beautiful Arabic calligraphy pieces, or Black students who compose their own hip-hop versions of poems to put a new and personal spin on old literature – and these students all DO deserve to be celebrated! When we say “literacy” in mainstream education, we’re normally talking about decoding and using the transcription system for one specific form of language: standardized academic English.

One obvious (to me) problem with this obsession is something I rarely see addressed in discussions of the so-called “achievement” gap in literacy outcomes: we teach the mechanics of producing and decoding transcriptions of academic English relentlessly in schools, even starting before most kids are developmentally ready to read, but without first making sure that all students are fluent enough in academic English to successfully use the transcription system.

Imagine being a native English speaker and trying to transcribe French without being at least passingly fluent in French – the spelling conventions and “silent” letters would drive you nuts! Or trying to read Farsi if you only spoke Arabic – the sound systems are similar enough that you could pronounce most words correctly, but would you understand what you were reading or why it was important? How can we expect our students to understand the transcription system of a form of language they don’t speak?

Students in US schools represent a rich diversity of cultures, language backgrounds and abilities. Enrollment data trends strongly suggest that our schools will continue to become more ethnically and linguistically diverse in the future. Meanwhile, educators, researchers and policymakers are all working diligently to solve the current “literacy crisis” in the US, and most solutions that I’ve seen involve trying to use new & improved methods or increases in funding & resources to do the same thing we’ve always done: teach a transcription system without addressing students’ fluency in the language form that system represents.

I have some BIG feelings about this.