Dialects in the Classroom

While speaking is natural and something all children learn to do without explicit instruction, reading and writing are not. Speech (and, almost certainly, signing) is ancient. We don't know exactly how long human beings have had the capacity for such a highly complex communication system, but we can be sure it goes back tens of thousands of years at the very least, given the archaeological evidence we have for abstract thought (ranging from pictographs to elaborate cave paintings to the burial of the dead). In all likelihood, given that it appears to be hard-wired into our brains that we will learn to speak (though the specific language is not hardwired and depends on exposure), the earliest anatomically modern humans, emerging about 200,000 years ago, already had this ability.

In contrast, writing is an invention whose timing can be pinpointed with a fair degree of accuracy. It has only been independently invented three or four times, to the best of our knowledge. Though we have examples of precursors to writing from all over the world (writing-like activities like pictograms or possible logographic symbols on, for example, the Narmer Palette in Egypt or the Indus Valley script from India), with the oldest dating back about 10,000 years, writing proper emerges first around 3500 BCE in the Fertile Crescent. At roughly the same time, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian Cuneiform were invented. Whether these two writing systems represent independent innovation or whether one civilization invented writing and the other borrowed the idea is a matter of ongoing debate, but in any case, the earliest clear examples of writing that we have date to only 5,500 years ago. Writing was also independently invented around 1600 BCE in China and around 600 BCE in Mesoamerica. Whenever writing has appeared, it has rapidly spread from its inventors to their neighbors and then beyond, with other groups either borrowing a system wholesale (though often adjusting it) or borrowing the idea but creating their own symbols.