Writing Systems and their Use

Instructors: Dimitrios Meletis

Writing systems relate graphic marks (e.g., the letters of Roman script or Chinese characters) with structures of specific languages (e.g., English or Mandarin). As tools of everyday communication deeply rooted in culture, they are processed with our hands, eyes, and brains and socio-pragmatically adapted to serve a wide range of purposes and contexts (consider handwritten note-taking vs. typing a formal email on a virtual keyboard on a phone's touchscreen). In many ways, writing resembles language—only in a more manageable microcosm: there are fewer types of writing systems than language types, the history of writing is much shorter than that of language, and its development and change can be more easily reconstructed since writing, unlike speech, is semi-permanent, with written records going back thousands of years. All of this renders writing an intriguing alternative lens into core linguistic questions concerning structure and use: On the one hand, remarkable functional universality is found in the few sound-based (phonographic) and meaning-based (morphographic) ways in which writing systems relate to languages as well as the fundamental cognitive processes involved in spelling and reading. On the other hand, the embeddedness of the world’s writing systems in highly diverse cultures and linguistic communities is only one factor resulting in great variation. This means that to get a complete linguistic picture of writing, we need to combine structural and systematic perspectives with use-oriented ones. Accordingly, this course not only covers central topics including the relationship between the spoken, signed, and written modalities of language, the structural description and typology of the world’s diverse writing systems, the psycholinguistics of reading and writing, the instruction and acquisition of literacy, and sociolinguistic aspects of writing, but does so with a focus on how an emerging ‘grapholinguistics’ also informs our understanding of language and linguistics in general.

Keywords: Sociolinguistics, Written Language, Psycholinguistics, Typology

Instructors

Dimitrios Meletis

University of Vienna

Dimitrios Meletis is a linguist specializing in grapholinguistics, the interdisciplinary study of writing and literacy. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Graz and is currently a postdoc researcher at the University of Vienna as well as a fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His previous research has been devoted to developing a comparative framework for describing the world’s diverse writing systems and has resulted in, among other things, broad definitions of central concepts such as ‘grapheme’ and ‘allography’. He sought to complement this descriptive framework with an interdisciplinary and usage-based explanatory theory to also explore the question of why writing systems are built the way they are built. The results were published in his open-access books ‘The Nature of Writing’ (Fluxus Editions, 2020) and, written together with Christa Dürscheid, ‘Writing Systems and Their Use’ (De Gruyter, 2022). His current project, titled 'Orthographic Relativity: Comparing Literacy and Normativity Across Writing Systems and Literate Cultures,' explores how literacy and the normative attitudes of language users influence each other.