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Primacy of spoken language.

Linguists hold that while many languages of the world are both written and spoken, more languages of the world are only spoken, and many languages of the world are spoken by more people than are written, therefore what is primary about language it that it is spoken. Written language is derived from spoken language, not vice versa. Therefore if we see a conflict between what is written and what is spoken, we will describe the language as actually being what is spoken. In fact most discrepancies between one norm or another in prescriptive grammar are conflicts over whether to follow spoken usage or written usage. Written usage is usually the norm of a previous stage of the language.



Harold Schiffman
Fri Jan 17 09:48:04 EST 1997