Page 42 - Literacy in the New Media Age

GOING INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD 31

The implications of all this – what is recorded, what is not, what views
of language open up, what is closed off to thought and so on – have not been
widely explored in the ‘West’. Writing has been so much in the centre that it has
simply not been possible to pose such questions. The writing, thinking and
research that there is has never formed a part of the mainstream of linguistic
work. Given that language, and the transcription systems that cultures have
developed over the millennia, are among the most potent social icons and
metaphors, this has been a huge limitation on thinking.

Language, speech, writing

My lengthy account of the transcription system of the alphabet has had several
aims. One is to show that it truly matters what we decide to include as being a
part of language. It also shows that what we include is always a convention,
established and maintained for social reasons. What has been established for
social reasons can be undone for social reasons. Academic disciplines have their
reasons for including and excluding elements from the domain that they have
made their own. In the case of linguistics, the wish to emulate the natural
sciences explains many of the exclusions which it has erected around its
conception of language. One of my aims has been to show that the relation
between language as spoken and language as written is far from straightforward,
even if we remain at the level of sound and letter alone – which of course we
cannot do in any fuller discussion of either language or of literacy. But above all
I want to demonstrate that it is impossible to remain abstract about ‘language’ or
‘literacy’, and yet at the same time retain a real interest in understanding what
they are like. Speech and writing are deeply different. That they were treated as
‘the same’ in most of the mainstream theories of language (which simply talked
about language-as-such) under the broad abstraction of ‘language’ for nearly all
of the last century, has much to do with the fact that theoretical abstraction had
ruled, in the service of establishing regularities or rules that might emulate those
produced in the natural sciences. Indeed, speech and writing are still seen as
‘much the same’ in much writing in linguistics, sociolinguistics and the
ethnographic approaches to literacy. There the two are seen as existing on a
continuum, not really distinguishable in terms of their affordances, shall we say.
The point of view which I advocate here, namely that the two are distinct modes,
is not the mainstream view.
Establishing that language has ‘rules’ made it seem a subject fit for ‘scientific
enquiry’, and made linguistics fit to take its place among the ‘sciences’.
Anything that proved troublesome to that goal was excluded. Yet lives are messy,
and, within the broader frames set in cultures and in society, they are endlessly
variable. Any meaning-making system that has to cope with that messiness and
its ceaselessly nuanced, subtle variability is not likely to be readily reducible to
rules. In some important areas of grammar and syntax there are of course strong,
rule-like regularities, such as the agreement in number of subject and verb in