Modern linguistics is grounded on a kind of interdictory warning that excludes writing from the scope of linguists’ scientific interests.

Saussure’s (1916) famous thoughts on the subject (which will be detailed in the following sections of this paper) not only contributed to mark the border between the oral and the written forms of language, it also banned writing from the scientific scope of linguistics among a substantial amount of researchers.

In this paper, we shall not argue against the assumption that the primary, intrinsic nature of language is to be found in its oral form. On the contrary, this is also a fundamental tenet of this study. Nevertheless, we shall try to demonstrate that written representations are not completely deprived of interest for the investigation about the nature, the form, and the contents of abstract linguistic representations. Our rationale, on this particular matter, is basically as follows: we assume phonology as part of the speakers’ linguistic competence—of their “knowledge of language” / “I-language”, in Chomsky’s (1986) classical terms—and, therefore, the description of such form of knowledge as the main goal of phonologists (Burton-Roberts, Carr, & Docherty, 2000, p. 2). For the description of the abstract form of knowledge that is the phonologists’ explicandum, multiple evidence can be found in written productions and in some dimensions of the writing systems’ organization, ranging from their history to some of their main structural properties. This is the main point to be developed in this article: How can the observation of written productions, and of writing systems underlying them, contribute to the development of what we know about speakers’ phonological knowledge, hence about phonology and the phonological systems of particular languages?

In Section 2 of this paper, a review of the main arguments about the relationship between “language” and “writing” will be made. This will include a brief overview of some intrinsic properties of the main writing systems of the world, too. Section 3 will be devoted to the key question of our study: How can the study of given aspects of writing offer us substantial evidence on phonology? A review of some empirical findings, obtained among speakers of Portuguese and showing an actual example of the relation between knowledge of writing and phonological knowledge, will follow (Section 4). In the same section, an overall discussion of the several aspects analysed throughout the article will also be developed.

Even though we do not ignore the importance of other modalities of language and speech—namely, Sign Language—attention will be paid to spoken and written language only. The same can be said about the theoretical frameworks that will be taken into consideration here: given our main motivation—indeed, to show that written representations are not completely useless for phonological research—our review of the main arguments about this issue will focus on the two leading trends in modern descriptive linguistics, that is to say, the Structuralist and the Generative approaches according to their classical models. We acknowledge the existence of other approaches and, even within these two rather broad labels, of several divergent views. In spite of this, our attention will focus on the most current interpretations that are found in the earliest or in the most widely read texts of the leading authors of these two influential, yet traditional theoretical frameworks.

In this section, we shall focus on the common understanding, among many linguists and phonologists, between spoken language and writing. Such common view postulates that the very nature of language is to be found in its oral (spoken) realisations. Consequently, writing is regarded not only as a secondary but also as a non-intrinsically linguistic realisation of language itself. That is to say, according to the canonical understanding of this particular issue, not only oral and written representations differ in shape and in surface manifestations, they also correspond to two ontologically distinct entities. A drastic consequence of this strict divide is this: only oral language deserves the attention of linguistic science; writing, being a cultural, anthropological by-product of “true” language, does not have a place within the scientific scope of linguistics.

As Coulmas (2003) puts it, this is part of “linguistic orthodoxy”, which finds its roots in the famous thoughts of Saussure (1916); see the following quotation, expressing a point of view shared by plenty of traditional linguists, such as Jespersen (1924, pp. 17–18), Bloomfield (1933, p. 21), Gleason Jr. (1955), or Martinet (1960, pp. 12–13), among others:

According to this viewpoint, the only admitted relation between both “modalities” of realising speech has a hierarchical, deterministic nature: formal/structural properties of language(s) may be mirrored by written forms, but writing never (or almost never) influences linguistic structure. That is to say, the relation is strictly univocal (spoken language → writing, never writing → spoken language), as we try to sketch out in Figure 1.

Insisting on Coulmas’ (2003) view again, this one-sense interference can be described in the following terms:

The rare cases where the opposite direction of this relationship is attested are seen as abnormal: since writing is intrinsically non-linguistic, external and subsidiary to spoken language, the mere hypothesis of its exerting any influence over an entity which it is supposed to mirror rather than to shape is almost completely impossible. Within the different approach of generative grammar, language—conceived of as a biologically formatted faculty, largely independent of cultural variables and assumed as fundamentally the same endowment among all individuals of the human species (Chomsky, 1965)—should not therefore be shaped by any sociocultural, historical accident like writing (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3; 1975, pp. 12, 27, 30; 1978, pp. 200–201; 1986; 1988, pp. 2, 4, 9–10; Crain & Fodor, 1993, p. 170; Pinker, 1994, p. 18).

It is beyond doubt that one of the primary forms of language is spoken language: oral realisations are intrinsically linguistic, contrarily to what happens with written forms. This is a classical standpoint of linguistics and the main arguments regarding this issue are summarised, among others, by Coulmas (2003, p. 11)—who, however, adopts a critical perspective on the categorical separation of both:

These differences not only allow us to compare two distinct entities: they constitute clear evidence that spoken language and writing do correspond to two separate intrinsic objects, to two ontologically different realities. Needless to say, they strengthen the traditional perspective among linguists (not only phonologists) that writing is not, properly speaking, a true object of study of their discipline. Still according to such current viewpoint, writing is but a mere secondary representation, a by-product of “real” (= oral/spoken) language.

A reflection of this common view leads to the lack, in introductory books on general linguistics, of chapters specifically devoted to writing, as Coulmas (2003, p. 10) and Daniels (2010a, p. 43, 2010b) put it.

This apparent “downgrading” of writing is found among linguists, but this seems to be exclusive of the Western, Saussurean linguistic tradition: in the Eastern traditions, writing is a central piece of linguistic thought (Coulmas, 2003, p. 10; Daniels, 2010b). This view, by the other hand, contrasts with the social importance that is generally recognised to writing and its mastery. That is to say, linguistic “phonocentrism” is somehow contradicted to current sociocultural “graphocentrism”, typical of modern, Western-like societies, where the importance of writing is over-rated, negative attitudes towards illiterate citizens are common, social organization strongly relies on written information, and common people tend to think of languages as written codes (Coulmas, 2003). Common sense about language structures and the nature of language, indeed, is strongly rooted in the awareness of the properties of writing systems: it becomes very apparent when we hear that “Hebrew has no vowels” (since the Hebrew abjad does not contain specific, segmental symbols for vowels; Rogers, 2005, p. 2) or when we teach phonetic transcription to beginner students (who very often are misled in their use of the International Phonetic Alphabet by the conventional writing), for instance.

Isolating writing from linguistic study, in the terms that were summarised above, has not led, though, to its eradication as an object of study. This is demonstrated in several ways, which will be briefly referred to in the next following paragraphs.

In this section, we will address the central question of our study: how, despite the assumption that spoken language and writing correspond to different entities and are basically studied by different disciplines, our knowledge of writing can illuminate our understanding of specific aspects of phonology.

As we briefly sketched out in Section 1, phonology is assumed here as part of the abstract I-language that constitutes the very object of study of linguistics. Consequently, phonology deals with an abstract form of knowledge (Burton-Roberts, Carr, & Docherty, 2000). As it happens with all disciplines that study non-empirical objects,¹ descriptive phonology has to find a way to reach its empirically unattainable units and phenomena, the abstract phonological representations that are embedded in speakers’ minds as part of their I-language (i.e., their “phonological knowledge”, according to Burton-Roberts, Carr, & Docherty, 2000, p. 2ff.; see also Berman, 1983, pp. 228, 231; Foss & Hakes, 1978, p. 20; Foster-Cohen, 1999, pp. 1–3, 8, 183).

In some previous studies in which we also addressed this specific question (Miranda & Veloso, 2017; Veloso, 2005, 2007, 2010), we have identified three possible ways to provide phonologists with a sort of “inferential access” to phonological knowledge:

The “external” manifestations of phonological knowledge to be found in creative spellings are, as previously mentioned, the most important for the sake of the present study: it is our aim to demonstrate how observing writing—a “visible” form of speech—one can make generalisations about the “invisible” phonology of languages, as also assumed by previous research. Additionally, we shall also admit that other forms of writing which are not purely idiosyncratic—as the main regularities that govern writing systems in general, ranging from the motivations that led to the creation of the earliest writing systems of the world to the fundamental features of current systems presently at use (partially comprehended by the “phylogenetic” dimension referred to above)—can also give us relevant phonological information.

These two instances of phonological relevance of writing manifestations—(1) non-canonical written forms by illiterate or poorly literate subjects, and (2) fundamental properties of established writing systems—will be analysed separately. In Sections 3.1 and 4, our attention will focus on the phonological information that can be collected from the observation of individual, non-canonical written productions. This survey will also show how literacy may arguably change the internal phonology of speakers. Section 3.2 will draw our attention to the inferences about phonological organisation that can be given by the observation of the principal features that govern the writing systems of the world throughout history.

In the previous sections, we explored the way in which the phonological properties of a spoken language can influence its writing system. This is a common assumption among linguists. The possibility of reconstructing past stages or phonological abstract representations of a spoken language on the basis of written forms, as explored in the previous sections, does not conflict with the current understanding among most linguists and phonologists according to whom spoken language and writing are rather independent and, what is more, the latter is a “mirror” of the former. In this section, we shall look at the opposite direction of this relation: how can the properties of a writing system have an impact on phonology itself?

In the following paragraphs, we shall present the results obtained with a group of Portuguese children who are learning how to write and read in their language. We observed how they explicitly manipulated words containing {S℘Obstruents} word-medial clusters. /S/, an underspecified coronal fricative, when occurring word-medially, can be licensed as the coda of the syllable at its left or as the onset of the syllable at its right. Many explanations for this variation have been proposed and discussed since the first orthographic treatises of the language (Leão, 1576 [1983]): due to the particular phonotactic behavior of coronal fricatives across a huge number of languages of the world (see, e.g., Kaye, 1992), words such as festa ‘party’ are explicitly split as fes.ta or fe.sta (the latter in violation of the Sonority Principle and the Dissimilarity Condition, as it often happens in other phonotactic environments of Portuguese—see Henriques, 2013, for instance). The conventional rules that govern written line-breaking in Portuguese impose that all line-breakings coincide with syllable boundaries; as for the specific cases where {S℘Obstruent} is found word-medially, it is postulated that these words be broken according to the mandatory pattern of letting <s> in the first line (assuming it as the written counterpart of the first syllable’s coda) and the following obstruent at the beginning of the following line (assuming it as the onset of the second syllable).

In our study, a group of 42 children, monolingual native speakers of European Portuguese (21 boys + 21 girls) was followed in a longitudinal study during their 2 first years of schooling (mean age at first observation = 6;11 years old, SD = 0;4 years; mean age at the last observation = 7;11 years old, SD = 0;4 years). Children were explicitly asked to split words with a medial {S℘Obstruent} (see words in Table 3).

At the end of the first year of schooling—before children were formally taught the line-breaking rules of written words—the results shown in the explicit syllable breaking task were as shown in Table 4.

Results show a division of these consonantal sequences almost at chance level, suggesting that children’s phonological representations still lack a clear parametrisation of the internal phonotactics of these structures of Portuguese.

One year later, the same children show a clear shift in their responses: /VS.C/ breakings, in accordance to the mandatory written line-breaking rules that are intensively taught during their second year of primary school, are clearly prevalent, as shown in Table 5. The differences between the results of first and second year are statistically significant (Wilcoxon test: z = 2.179; p < 0.05).

This shift—from a stage of the children’s phonological knowledge where {S℘Obstruent} does not seem to have a clear prosodic representation towards a stage where they are prosodised in strict accordance with the orthographic rules that govern written line-breaking—is interpreted as a result of schooling: indeed, it is during the second year of primary school that Portuguese children are intensively exposed to formal instruction of such rules and, in our view, it could explain the observed change.

The importance of these results has to do with the strong suggestion that, as it happens with the development of phoneme awareness (commonly accepted as a result of literacy, too; see Section 2), it seems possible to alter some parameters of phonological representations via the written forms and the contact of subjects with writing. That is to say, spoken language and writing, though being different in nature and mutually extrinsical, can be closely related in many aspects. More importantly, and contrarily to what is generally assumed by most mainstream phonologists and linguists in general, not only language properties shape the written forms: the latter can also determine aspects of the subjects’ phonology, as suggested by the results that are referred to in this section.

For a phonologist, then, looking at written representations and at the way they are learnt and processed by different cultures and individuals can lead to important conclusions that otherwise would remain out of reach. In other terms, when confronted with the difficulty of making the invisible phonology visible, phonologists can rely, even if limitedly, on the “visible speech” embedded in written forms to collect reliable information about their explicandum. Even if accepting the intrinsical, ontological distinction between both forms of realising speech and language, a bridge between both proves fruitful for our understanding of the abstract nature of phonology.