What is writing?: Grapholinguistics as a field of scholarly inquiry

Abstract

Once upon a time, written texts were central to the analysis of language. Yet in the 20th century, it was <i>spoken</i> language that would come to be considered the primary object of study in the emergent discipline of linguistics. This shift has been famously epitomized by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who asserted that studying the written form of language was akin to “learn[ing] about someone by looking at his photograph”.<br/> In recent decades, however, there has been a Renaissance in new and exciting research on writing systems in linguistics, as well as in disciplines like anthropology and archaeology. Indeed, it has been claimed that, “the topic of writing systems is now “hot”” (Sproat, 2018, p. 269). This is affirmed by the recent acceptance of a new name for the study of writing systems: grapholinguistics.<br/> In this talk, we explain what grapholinguistics is all about, what counts as writing—and what doesn’t—the different forms that writing takes around the world and its diverse applications. In so doing, we discuss how writing is special kind of linguistic technology that models spoken language in a variety of ways, but has properties and potentialities that range beyond the immediacy of speech.