The letter killeth: Writing and scriptism

Abstract

Linguistics has always stood against the belief, widespread across many cultures, that the true, primary, correct form of a language is located in its written version. Roy Harris called this belief ‘scriptism’, and made it one of the component fallacies of his ‘integrationist’ critique of mainstream linguistics, which he regarded as ‘segregationist’ in its aim of separating a language system from actual verbal communicative acts. Yet Harris’s treatment of spoken and written language is not entirely consistent with his own critique. In particular, it takes for granted that writing changes not only the way people think about language, but their cognitive capacity generally. The present article explores other arguments that have been made for and against such a view, and proposes that integrationists should be sceptical of Harris’s position concerning scriptism, and should think about ways of undertaking empirical research into the question of whether literacy entails or is required for a particular way of conceiving language, or whether on the contrary literacy already requires such a conception.