Spelling as Culture

Abstract

The equation of literacy with culture is old and frequently disparaged by modern linguists. This disparagement is easily understood, since advocates of a link between literacy and culture most often use this proposed link as a cudgel for arguing that illiteracy entails unculture and barbarism. Thus, introductory texts routinely introduce us to the nineteenth-century anthropologist according to whom a primitive preliterate tribe of savages has not only no culture but worse, not even a real language, because they have no writing system.