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Difference Between Spoken And Written Language

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The question about language has been always raised as it is perceived as a human phenomenon which includes the abilities to communicate with other people. It is hard to tell when the first established communicative signals of mankind started to exist and it is only known that the primitive writing system were developed by 4000 BC in the region of Sumer in southern Babylonia. However, the distinction between spoken and written language is clear. Even if both languages bear some similarities, such as having communicative functions, they greatly differ in their grammatical principles and behavior, and in the vocabulary.

The main similarity between spoken and written languages is that they both have communicative function. Spoken language has prosodic characteristic, such as intonation, rhythm and pausing, which let people to identify what kind of idea is transferred in the speech. For instance, ‘In English, statements, wh-questions, commands, and exclamations traditionally are described as having falling intonational patterns and yes-no questions as having typically rising patterns’ (Chun 2000:52). On the contrary, written language contains certain symbols and one of their functions is status marking of a written phrase. Taking the examples of expressions in spoken language mentioned by Chun, full stops ‘.’, question marks ‘?’ and exclamatory marks ‘!’ in written language as well as intonational patterns in spoken language can help to identify the act of stating (I am here.),
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