I remember the first time I attended a linguistics lecture as an undergraduate in Argentina. The lecturer asked a simple question: where does language come from? My instinctive answer was: books.

After four decades researching language and linguistics, that response now seems almost absurd. But it reflects a common bias among those of us raised in text-based cultures. We tend to view written language as the ultimate form of expression, knowledge transmission and even thinking itself.

Yet linguists know that speech comes first – historically, developmentally and cognitively.

Writing is a relatively recent technological invention layered on top of something much older and more fundamental. Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure puts it best:

Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first.

Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first.

The heart of language

In sociolinguistics – the study of language in society – the most valued form of language is what researchers call the vernacular: the way people speak naturally when they are not paying attention to how they sound.

The pioneering sociolinguist William Labov famously argued that “the history of a language is the history of its vernacular”. In other words, languages vary and change through everyday speech, not through formal writing.

Because of this, sociolinguists focus on capturing naturally........

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