Are Written and Spoken English distinct languages?

Question

First of all, I am not a linguist, but I was thinking the other night that being literate was almost the same as being bilingual.

My reasoning is that sign language is distinct from written and spoken English, and sign language is a "visual" language in the same way that written English is. Also, homonyms and homophones would be entirely analagous, if these are considered different langauges.

It seems to me that the only reason they could be considered the same language, is that they follow each other so closely. That is, there are many one-to-one literal translations between them.

This distinction is relevant in natural language processing contexts, because it would mean that "understanding" a language and "translating" between languages would be distinct problems. I believe that this could reduce the problem space substantially.

Surely, I am not the first person to think this, but as I have no formal training on the subject; I'm not sure what the real story is. So, Are written and spoken languages considered distinct? If not, why not?

Answer 1

As far as I can surmise, written and spoken are not quite two distinct languages. A written language and a spoken language are, in general, two different media of communication. What keeps them from being distinct, however, is that a written language is a representation of a spoken languages. Each word in a written language corresponds to a word in a spoken language.

The first paragraph of the wiki article on written language states this in detail:

A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children; children will pick up spoken language (oral or sign) by exposure without being specifically taught.

A written language exists only as a complement to a specific spoken language, and no natural language is purely written. However, extinct languages may be in effect purely written when only their writings survive.

So in effect, a written and a spoken language are two separate representations of the same language. In theory a human language can exist with only one or the other--the Iroquois languages are among the most famous languages which historically have no written form. But because of the one-to-one correlation of words, they are best thought of as a pair, in effect constituent to what we call a single language.

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Sign language, on the other hand, does not have a one-to-one correlation to any spoken language. Moreover, American and British Sign Languages are two entirely different languages, even though they are both spoken in English speaking countries. A sign language is neither a written nor an orally spoken language. Each one is a language of its own.

Answer 2

Sign languages and spoken languages are both real, natural languages, learnable and normally learned automatically by children -- without any special training -- if they are used in the speech community the children grow up in.

Written languages, however, are always representations of some spoken language; one has to be specially trained in the technology of literacy.

An analogy is horses vs cars -- horses are natural, cars are technological. Horses have drawbacks and limitations compared with cars as a means of transportation, but one big advantage of horses is that they can make more horses without a factory, or even any education.

The fact that most people in a community are literate does not automatically result in the children of that community becoming literate, the way a common language generates new speakers (or signers). They have to go to school -- no school, no literacy.

But they all speak or sign, whether they're literate or not.

Answer 3

Written English comes in many varieties. When people write like they speak, their written language is more or less a transcription of what they say orally. When they write the kind of formal expository prose that is usually required for PhD dissertations, they write a variety that normally follows rules that speakers don't follow when they speak. This frequently yields stuffy, stilted prose -- what's often derisively called academic prose, and represents the worst side of the language: verbose, boring, complex, pretentious, and just plain undecipherable (cf. postmodernist parlance) -- or clear, easy-to-grok prose. Formal written English is a separate language only in the sense that it must conform to rigid rules laid out in great and sometimes confusing and conflicting detail and arbitrary rules in style manuals -- and not all style manuals agree.

All the grammar anxiety about language comes from confusing the spoken and written forms. Although they are essentially the same language, they are different varieties and require some different skills, and proficient speaking doesn't guarantee proficient formal writing (and vice versa). I remember reading somewhere that Thomas Jefferson wasn't a good speaker. He certainly was an excellent writer of formal expository prose, though.

The language taught in textbooks is a written language and usually artificial. When I studied German, I was assured that what my textbooks taught me was something called "Schuldeutsch", a language found only in textbooks and not on the lips of native speakers of German. When I studied Japanese, I was assured that my textbooks were teaching me something called "Nihongo" and not the everyday language spoken by the Japanese in Japan. When I started teaching English as a foreign language, I decided that the textbooks I was using were teaching students an artificial variety of English -- and listening to the tapes and CDs that accompanied those texts confirmed how phony that variety of English was, so I started writing all my own materials using my idiolect and using "authentic" English as spoken and written by other native speakers (TV news reports mostly).

The other answers provided here are excellent. I especially like John Lawler's sentence "... we might even think of English writing as corresponding to a dialect of English that has not been spoken anywhere since around 1500." That just about sums up the difference between spoken and written English. Most of us don't speak like we write or write like we speak. Speaking is natural and a naturally acquired skill; writing is an unnatural act and mechanical and "must be carefully taught".