language should look and sound like. The job was not only to teach
writing, but more important, to instill a respect for institutionalized
authority in matters of language. This is still the case today.
The most salient feature which distinguishes an abstracted, idealized
standard written or printed English from the reality of spoken language is
conformity or the suppression of variation. That suppression is not easily
achieved. It is a battle continually fought, and never completely won.
For linguists, the spoken language is of primary (and often, exclusive)
interest. In this we linguists are pretty much alone; for most people
involved in education – and many others, as well – the written language
continues as a commodity of huge dimensions and complexity:
Although the bias that speech is primary over writing has been
extremely important in guiding research efforts within linguistics, it
has not been widely accepted outside of linguistics. In fact, the
historical view that written, literary language is true language
continues as the dominant lay perception to the present time. Our
children need to study English at school, which includes written
composition and the prescriptive rules of writing, not speech ... We
expect our grammars and dictionaries to present the correct forms of
written language; [when they instead ] present both literate and
colloquial vocabulary they are severely criticized for destroying the
standards of English.
(Biber 1988: 5–6)The primacy of the spoken language is easy enough to bolster with factual
evidence, but it is perhaps the single most difficult concept for non-
linguists to fully grasp and accept. In our minds the spoken and written
languages are so intertwined that we seem sometimes incapable of
distinguishing between them. A LanguageLog post (“Pronouncing it by the
book”)^13 provides examples of the kind of extreme emotional investment
some people put in the idea of the superiority of the written language: