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 of 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.
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 occurring conversation. The gold standard is storytelling – moments when speakers become so engaged they forget they are being recorded, pay little attention to their speech, and slip into their most naturalistic type of interaction.
In my own research with Glenys Collard, we use yarning, an Indigenous cultural form of storytelling and conversation, to gather spoken Aboriginal English. Yarning is not just a research method. It is also a culturally grounded way of sharing knowledge that respects the protocols and safety of the communities involved in sociolinguistic research.
Why are we so preoccupied with writing?
If speech is central to language, why do modern societies treat writing as the ultimate form of knowledge?
Part of the answer lies in why humans invented writing systems in the first place. Writing allowed information to be recorded for posterity, freed memory from having to carry everything around, and enabled administrative and scientific systems to expand.
Writing also became a tool of power – from the management of empires to the spread of colonial governance. For instance, the so-called “conquest” of the Americas by Spain was greatly facilitated by the publication, in 1492, of Nebrija’s Grammar of Castilian which facilitated the task of imposing the Spanish language to the detriment of Indigenous ancestral languages.
Over time, Western institutions came to treat written language as the primary vehicle of knowledge. Universities, bureaucracies and courts all operate through documents. Written scholarship became the gold standard of learning and authority.
Even our most famous dictionaries relied on writing. The Oxford English Dictionary was built through generations of volunteers who read texts and submitted written examples of words in use.
Education followed the same model. Students read books, wrote essays and were assessed through written exams. From medieval monastic libraries such as the Old Library at All Souls College, Oxford to modern universities, writing became synonymous with thinking.
The challenge of generative AI
Today, that model is under significant pressure.
The emergence of large language models has unsettled longstanding assumptions about writing and learning. If a machine can generate coherent essays in seconds, how can educators be sure students are doing the intellectual work themselves?
This has sparked renewed interest in something linguists have always considered to be primary: speech.
Some scholars now argue universities should place greater emphasis on oral assessment – conversations, presentations and live examinations – where students explain their thinking in real time. Once that understanding is demonstrated, AI tools could still assist with shaping the final written output.
In this sense, new technology may be pushing education back toward one of the oldest forms of knowledge exchange: spoken dialogue.
Orality can broaden who gets heard
A renewed emphasis on speech may have other benefits too.
Written academic English often acts as a gatekeeper, particularly for multilingual students whose most dominant language is not English. Many people can think, analyse and debate complex ideas more effectively in their first language than in the global language of academia.
Emerging technologies increasingly allow students to brainstorm orally in their own language, then translate or refine their ideas into written English. In theory, this could make academic spaces more linguistically inclusive.
According to some, artificial intelligence may end up amplifying something deeply human: our capacity to think through conversation.
Returning to the spoken word
None of this means writing will disappear. Written records remain essential for preserving knowledge, building scholarship and communicating across time and distance.
But it may be time to rebalance our assumptions.
Speech is where daily language lives. It is where stories are told, identities negotiated and new linguistic forms emerge. For millennia, humans have thought together by talking.
As technology reshapes how we write, we may rediscover something linguists have long known; to understand language – and perhaps even thinking itself – we need to start with the spoken word.
Through a complex combination of privilege, prestige and standardisation, written language has occupied a prime position in Western societies for the past few centuries. Yet spoken language remains the foundation on which writing rests. Large language models have disrupted this longstanding hierarchy, but speech remains. Let the spoken word be our guide as we walk together through rapidly changing times.
- is an Associate Professor, Chair of Linguistics and Director of Language Lab, The University of Western Australia
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
