Differences And Similarities Between Spoken And Written Language

It is hard to tell when the first established communicative signals of mankind started to exist and it is only known that the primitive writing system was developed by 4000 BC in the region of Sumer in southern Babylonia. One thing that hasn’t changed till these days is the fact that language, as a particular human phenomenon, can be divided into two main forms: spoken and written. Even if both languages bear some similarities, such as the status marking of the sentences (is it a question, a statement, etc.), they greatly differ in their grammatical principles and behavior, and in the vocabulary.

The main similarity between spoken and written languages is that they can mark the status of a sentence. Spoken language has prosodic characteristic, …show more content…
One of the major differences could be explored between pronouns and nouns in spoken and written languages. In conversations people are directly facing each other and usually both, the speaker and the hearer, are familiar with the same context and share similar knowledge at the particular point of time, consequently, pronouns are more frequently found to occur in spoken language than in texts. The data collected from Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus (LSWE) indicate that the frequency of using pronouns in conversations is up to 170 thousand words per million, whereas in academic written register the number of frequency is only up to 40 thousand words per million (see Biber et al 2002:92). These statistics indicate that, as pronouns can substitute the noun or the noun phrase, it is more convenient to use them in conversations. As a consequence, spoken language could be seen as more compact form of language than the written one. To the contrary, in the written discourse the content is obscure to the reader, so, in order to introduce new information, written registers contain more nouns. The LSWE corpus presents that in conversations nouns are used about 150 thousand times per million, while in the written texts of academic register about 300 thousand times per million (see Biber et al 2002:92). So, by summing up the statistics and bearing in mind that pronouns belong to a grammatical …show more content…
In spite of the correspondence and dissimilarities between spoken and written languages made throughout this essay, it should be remembered that the grammatical and social patterns of a language and the vocabulary alter the language and its meaning either it is spoken or written, therefore, further studies relating to these particular aspects should be