In a world of AI texts, language still reigns supreme

I remember the first time I attended a linguistics lecture as a student in Argentina. The lecturer asked a simple question: Where does the language come from? My instinctive answer was: books.

After four decades of research into language and linguistics, this answer now seems almost absurd. But it reflects a common bias among those of us raised in text-based cultures. We tend to think of written language as the ultimate form of expression, knowledge transfer, and even thought itself.

Still, linguists know that language comes first—historically, developmentally, and cognitively.

Writing is a relatively new technological invention that builds on something much older and more fundamental. The Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure puts it in a nutshell:

Speech and writing are two different sign systems; the second exists solely for the purpose of representing the first.

The heart of language

In sociolinguistics – the study of language in society –…