Two types of bilingualism have been distinguished, according to whether the two languages were acquired from the simultaneous experience of the use of both in the same circumstances and settings or from exposure to each language used in different settings (an example of the latter is the experience of English children living in India during the period of British ascendancy there, learning English from their parents and an Indian language from their nurses and family servants). However acquired, bilingualism leads to mutual interference between the two languages; extensive bilingualism within a community is sometimes held partly responsible for linguistic change. Interference may take place in pronunciation, in grammar, and in the meanings of words. Bilinguals often speak their two languages each with “an accent”; i.e., they carry into each certain pronunciation features from the other. The German word order in He comes tomorrow home has been reported as an example of grammatical interference, and in Canadian French the verb introduire has acquired from English the additional meaning “introduce, make acquainted” (which in metropolitan French is présenter). Literacy
The acquisition of literacy is something very different from the acquisition of one’s spoken or signed native language, even when the same language is involved, as it usually is. Speaking, signing, and writing are learned skills, but there the resemblance ends. Children learn their first language at the start involuntarily and mostly unconsciously from random exposure, even if no attempts at teaching are made. Literacy is deliberately taught and consciously and deliberately learned. There is ongoing debate on the best methods and techniques for teaching literacy in various social and linguistic settings. Literacy is learned by a person already possessed of the basic structure and vocabulary of his language.
Such facts should be obvious, but the now-accepted standard of near-universal literacy in technologically advanced countries, along with the fact that in second-language learning one usually acquires speech and writing skills at the same time, tends to bring these parts of language learning under one head. Literacy is manifestly a desirable attainment for all communities, though not necessarily in all languages. It must be borne in mind that there are many distinct languages spoken in the world today by fewer than 1,000 or 500 or even 50 persons. The capital investment in literacy, including teaching resources, teacher time and training, printing, publications, and so forth, is vast, and it can be economically and socially justified only when applied to languages used and likely to continue to be used by substantial numbers over a wide area.
Literacy is in no way necessary for the maintenance of linguistic structure or vocabulary, though it does enable people to add words from the common written stock in dictionaries to their personal vocabulary very easily. It is worth emphasizing that until relatively recently in human history all languages were spoken or signed by illiterate speakers and that there is no essential difference as regards pronunciation, structure, and complexity of vocabulary between spoken or signed languages that have writing systems used by all or nearly all their speakers and the languages of illiterate communities.
Literacy has many effects on the uses to which language may be put; storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information are greatly facilitated, and some uses of language, such as philosophical system building and the keeping of detailed historical records, would scarcely be possible in a community wholly without writing. In these respects the lexical content of a language is affected, for example, by the creation of sets of technical terms for philosophical writing and debate. Because the permanence of writing overcomes the limitations of memory span imposed on speech or signing, sentences of greater length can easily occur in writing, especially in types of written language that are not normally read aloud and that do not directly represent what would be spoken. An examination of some kinds of oral literature, however, reveals the ability of the human brain to receive and interpret spoken sentences of considerable grammatical complexity.
In relation to pronunciation, writing does not prevent the historical changes that occur in all languages. Part of the apparent irrationality of English spelling, such as is found also in some other orthographies, lies just in the fact that letter sequences have remained constant while the sounds represented by them have changed. For example, the gh of light once stood for a consonant sound, as it still does in the word as pronounced in some Scots dialects, and the k of knave and knight likewise stood for an initial k sound (compare the related German words Knabe and Knecht). A few relatively uncommon words, including some proper names, are reformed phonetically, specifically to bring their pronunciation more in line with their spelling. Spelling pronunciations, as these are called, are a product of general literacy. In London the pronunciation of St. Mary Axe as if it were spelled “Simmery Axe” is now decidedly old-fashioned. St. John (“Sinjin”) and St. Clair (“Sinclair”) survive as proper names with their old pronunciations, in the latter case helped by the presence of the alternative spelling Sinclair. Written language
Historically, culturally, and in the individual’s life, writing is subsequent to speech or signing and presupposes it. Aristotle expressed the relation thus: “Speech is the representation of the experiences of the mind, and writing is the representation of speech” (On Interpretation). But it is not as simple as this would suggest. Alphabetic writing, in which, broadly, consonant and vowel sounds are indicated by letters in sequence, is the most widespread system in use today, and it is the means by which literacy will be disseminated, but it is not the only system, nor is it the earliest. Evolution of writing systems
Writing appears to have been evolved from an extension of picture signs: signs that directly and iconically represented some thing or action and then the word that bore that meaning. Other words or word elements not readily represented pictorially could be assigned picture signs already standing for a word of the same or nearly the same pronunciation, perhaps with some additional mark to keep the two signs apart. This sort of device is used in children’s word puzzles, as when the picture of a berry is used to represent, say, the second half of the name Canterbury. This opens the way for what is called a character script, such as that of Chinese, in which each word is graphically represented by a separate individual symbol or character or by a sequence of two or more such characters. Writing systems of this sort have appeared independently in different parts of the world.
Chinese character writing has for many centuries been stylized, but it still bears marks of the pictorial origin of some characters. Chinese characters and the characters of similar writing systems are sometimes called ideograms, as if they directly represented thoughts or ideas. This is not so. Chinese characters stand for Chinese words or, particularly as in modern Chinese, bits of words (logograms); they are the symbolization of a particular language, not a potentially universal representation of thought. The ampersand (&) sign, standing for and in English printing, is a good isolated example of a logographic character used in an alphabetic writing system.