Language modality is the medium or format through which language is conveyed. Human language shows up in at least four different modalities:

• Spoken language, also known as vocal-auditory language, is produced by making sounds with the vocal tract and is perceived through hearing.
• Signed language (or sign language), also known as manual-visual language, is produced by making movements with the hands, face, and body, and is perceived through seeing.
• Tactile language, also known as manual-tactile language, is produced by making movements with the hands, face, and body, and is perceived through touch.
• Graphemic language (or written language) is produced by making markings (such as the letters of the Latin alphabet) on some material and is perceived through seeing.

Language is often embedded in multi-modal communication, meaning we use multiple modalities simultaneously to communicate. For example, someone using spoken language will frequently use body posture and hand gestures at the same time.

In this book, we are primarily concerned with English and other spoken languages. It is important, however, to keep in mind that a general model of human language must be able to take into account all of the attested modalities of human language. Studying different modalities can give us different clues about which aspects of language are a result of the specific physical constraints of a particular modality, and which are a result of more general properties of human cognition, social relations and the functions that language serves (among them, most prominently, communication). Historically, the field of linguistics has overlooked signed and tactile languages and focused primarily on spoken language.

Why writing is different

The vocal-auditory modality, the manual-visual modality and the manual-tactile modality are all primary modalities, they are direct physical manifestations of language. Graphemic language is different. Unlike the other three modalities, writing is a secondary modality: it does not represent language directly, but instead represents one of the primary modalities (typically the spoken modality). For example, written English is a representation of spoken English. The specific relationship between speech and writing depends on the writing system used. In alphabetic writing systems, like the Latin alphabet used for English, German and most of the world’s languages, the letters of the alphabet represent sounds (although often not very well, a point we will return to in Section 3.6). Other writing systems use units that represent syllables or even whole words or parts of words.

Here are some of the ways in which writing is different from other modalities:

• Spoken, signed and tactile language can be acquired by human children without any conscious effort from their social environment, and most children do acquire at least one language in this way, although many humans learn additional languages later on in a less subconscious and effortless way in formal instructional settings. In contrast, written language can only be learned with a conscious effort, mostly in formal instructional settings. Since written language is a representation of one of the other modalities, it can only be learned after at least one spoken, signed or tactile language has been acquired.
• Through most of human history, the other modalities of language were transient, disappearing as soon as they were produced. With the advent of recording technologies, it has become possible to capture and replay communication involving these modalities, but these recordings are records of a specific communication event. Writing, by contrast, is inherently permanent. It will not, of course, exist forever, but it can potentially exist for thousands of years. More importantly, its continued existence is fully independent of the language user who produced it and the situation in which it was produced. Because of this, writing is often not as interactive as other modalities of language, which, in turn, affects many of its properties. For example, written languages have different discourse structures and different vocabularies, and even their grammars differ from those of the respective spoken or signed languages. Written languages tend to be more conservative, often lagging behind changes in the primary modalities.
• Unlike spoken and signed languages, which have emerged and developed naturally in every human community throughout human history, writing is a deliberate invention that has occurred independently only a handful of times in a handful of language communities. Many languages do not have a written form at all, and most of the language communities whose languages do have a written form borrowed their writing system, or at least the general idea of writing, from another language community. And even in language communities with writing, there are individuals who never learn to read or write but who nevertheless have a complete command of their language.

Because of these differences, we must be careful not to base our general models of language on written languages. Linguists often exclude written language from consideration (or at least, they try to do so). However, there are at least three reasons why written language is worthy of being studied in its own right. First, in highly literate language communities, written communication pervades all aspects of life and members of the community must have a command of written language in order to participate in the practices of the community. Second, the properties of written language in all its different, sometimes highly culture-specific forms (think poetry, literature, religious texts, academic texts, etc.) give us important insights both into the culture of a language community and into the limits to which language can be pushed. Third, in some cases (when studying older stages of a language or when studying an extinct language), written documents are all we have.

Also, note that while the fundamental distinction between spoken, signed or tactile languages on the one hand and written language on the other hand is quite clear, things are more complicated once we take a more comprehensive view of the language practices of current language communities. Three examples: First, while we acquire our first language(s) naturally in the spoken, signed or tactile modality, we can (and often do) learn additional languages later on in a much more deliberate way and to a large part through the written modality. Second, while written language is inherently permanent and non-interactive, we now also use it in transient, interactive ways, for example, in text messaging. Third, while children may typically learn to write consciously in formal instructional settings, the omnipresence of written language in highly literate language communities offers the potential for children to acquire written language from the environment in ways that are at least similar to the acquisition of other modalities. However, none of these complexities change the basic fact that the other modalities are primary while writing is secondary.

The study of modality

Because spoken languages have long been the default object of study in linguistics, and because the vocal-auditory modality is centred on sound, the study of linguistic modality is called phonetics, a term derived from the Ancient Greek root φωνή (phōnḗ) ‘sound, voice’. However, all languages have many underlying similarities, so linguists have long used many of the same terms to describe properties of different modalities, even when the etymology is specific to spoken languages. This includes the term phonetics, which is now commonly used to refer to the study of linguistic modality in general, not just the vocal-auditory modality.

It is not unusual for scientists to use terms that would be imprecise or downright wrong if we took them literally. An example that you know well is the word atom, which comes from the Ancient Greek ἄτομος (átomos), which literally means ‘indivisible’. The term was used by Ancient Greek philosophers to refer hypothetically to the smallest building blocks of matter, and when scientists in the late 19th century discovered the atom, they used this term. It did not take long before they realized that what they had called atom was not, in fact, indivisible, but the term continues to be used to this day. In this respect, scientific terminology is no different from everyday language, where meanings of words change continually, so that the origin of a word may give you a hint to its meaning, but does not determine it.

This can cause a problem if we take terminology literally, especially if we hold biases that we do not reflect sufficiently. This is the case with respect to signed and tactile languages: Many linguists do not have an extensive interest or extensive knowledge about these languages and so they tend to consider them secondary to spoken language or even forget about them completely when building models of particular aspects of language. Using a term like phonetics, with its clear association to sound, reinforces this bias towards the spoken modality. Keep this in mind, even as we now focus on the phonetics of spoken languages.

Specifically, we focus on articulatory phonetics in this chapter, which is the study of how the body creates a linguistic signal. The other two major components of modality also have dedicated subfields of phonetics. Perceptual phonetics is the study of how the human body perceives and processes linguistic signals (for spoken languages, this field is also called auditory phonetics). We can also study the physical properties of the linguistic signal itself. For spoken languages, this is the field of acoustic phonetics, which studies sound waves (there is currently no comparable subfield of phonetics for signed languages, because the physical properties of light waves are not normally studied by linguists). While these subfields — especially perceptual phonetics — have an important place in linguistics, they are beyond the scope of this textbook.

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CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0, Introduction from Juliane Doner The Linguistic Analysis of Word and Sentence Structures; remainder adapted from Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi, Essentials of Linguistics. 2nd ed.; with minor edits and extensions by Anatol Stefanowitsch.