Dialects in the Classroom

Writing systems may represent language at different levels. Logographic writing is a system in which symbols, known as graphemes, represent entire words. Purely logographic writing is rare in practice and exists primarily as an early step on the way to systems that encode speech at lower levels. Systems often said to be logographic, like Chinese, are in fact morpho-phonemic in their modern form. Graphemes in syllabaries (for example, Japanese katakana) represent sound at the level of the syllable, as the name implies. The first alphabet, the system we use, emerged roughly 3,000 years ago when the Greeks adapted the abjad (a phonemic system representing only consonants, as modern Arabic and Hebrew writing do today) used by the Phonecians—-who, in turn, had borrowed Egyptian writing. In fact, some of the symbols we use to write English today can be traced directly to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Romans in turn borrowed the alphabet from the Greeks, adapted it to their own language (changing, adding, and deleting some symbols along the way) and then spread it around Western Europe. The English alphabet is thus an adaptation of the Roman alphabet (and thus traceable directly to Egyptian hieroglyphs), though it has undergone some important changes that affect literacy instruction since it was first used to write down English. Standardization and subsequent sound change have rendered English a comparatively difficult language to learn to read — for all English speakers everywhere.