Spoken and Written Language

Until the middle of the twentieth century, linguists and anthropologists paid little attention to the relationship between and differences in spoken and written language. Since then, there has been a considerable literature attempting to define the differences between them (Goody and Watt, 1968; Ong, 1982; Olson, 1988). More recently, anthropologists and sociolinguists have challenged this literature, arguing that it treats literacy and oracy in purely technical terms, rather than as social practices embedded in power structures (Scribner and Cole, 1981; Heath, 1983; Street, 1984; Graff, 1987; Barton, 1994).