Writing systems
Languages With No Written Form: How They Are Recorded
How unwritten languages are documented, what a practical orthography is, and who decides on one.
The process of documenting a language with no established writing system begins by capturing the spoken language through careful recording, transcription, and phonetic analysis. Only after those steps does the hard work of forging a practical orthography begin, one tailored to be adopted by the community.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is often the first tool for documenting an oral language. A celebrated research note published by the International Phonetic Association in 1949 states that the IPA exists to "promote the scientific study of phonetics and the application of that science to a variety of practical purposes," including languages without concluded writing conventions.
In practice, a project to document an unwritten language typically begins by gathering a core body of speech samples. Oxford Academic found in a 2020 chapter on phonology that detailed oral recordings can be a precious tool for documentation, with stylistic and phonetic nuances that precisely model speech. Oxford scholars recommend using the International Phonetic Alphabet as a baseline to describe the phonology before transcribing it.
While the initial phase of working with oral languages is all about how the language sounds, the second phase addresses how to provide speakers with a standardized written form. In a 2014 title titled Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages, SIL International notes that orthography development for unwritten languages can involve creating or reforming a system.
A crucial insight from orthography expert Keren Rice and linguist Michael Cahill, who co-authored the Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages title, is that the orthography itself should not be an abstraction only interesting to linguists, but something that satisfies the actual necessities of speakers.
That suggests that a successful orthography is a practical, agreed-upon writing system that a community can adopt, not just an academic experiment or intellectual commitment. Rice and Cahill describe "a practical orthography" as an orthography that is usable for the purpose of documenting, describing and developing the language, and community-based decision-making is presented in the text as close to a key to success.
Rice and Cahill suggest that regardless of the specifics of the process, the goal is that the orthography be something that speakers actually use and that it can be a resource for the community.
Indeed, the task of creating an orthography for a speech community is presented as something that can make a real, scripted, and ongoing contribution to the community, rather than something that is over and done with when a standard is set.
When the Central Institute of Indian Languages conducted an Orthography Development for Languages of NorthEast India project that started on 22 August 2020, the institution sought to bring practical results to the documented languages, both phone-bank and print-based.
The Central Institute described orthography as "the principles and methods for spelling and expressing words in written language through a standardized writing system." and among its list of central objectives: identifying languages that are not written, furnishing phonological descriptions, producing language resources, and developing an orthography for at least three languages. In the end, the Central Institute claimed it produced multifunctional documentation, phonological descriptions, phonetic narratives, orthographies, and
This helps show how a practical orthography needn't be something drafted years before ever seeing use. Instead, it can be a real-world, word-by-word script crafted in collaboration with the community itself.
At the same time, it takes real work to turn what starts as a name and location on a map into something that can be practically applied once a script is developed.
Nor is there an ultimate authority to decide what an orthography will be, with decisions on the language's future taking place "within the community". There might be no single authority. Despite the crucial role that orthographies can play in the life of a language, the project is often approached rather freely and there is no inevitable mechanism to adopt an orthography becoming established.
Yet orthography has not always been so open-ended. The recommendations from the 1930 Practical Orthography of African Languages, for example, suggested that African languages be scripted from the Roman basis, and that an orthography should "use one letter for each phoneme," featuring a phoneme-to-letter mapping. Those phonemic principles have maintained their relevance, and produced an embarrassment of riches, with "numerous alphabets designed for the orthographies of languages without a formal writing system, often remaining unused."
The need to aurally represent each phoneme was at one point the focus of most orthographies, while the community-led approach of many modern orthographies means that an oral language's orthography is now commonly designed with and for the community, and seeks to be more than a symbol for a sound.
Following the publication of Rice and Cahill's text, new perspectives emerged in the field of orthography. Instead of focusing on spelling each sound, orthography experts began to shift towards developing systems that are usable for the speech community and tailored to the language's functional need.
The result for documentation and orthography development has been bidding for more community input, with stakeholders now regularly expressing "interest in participating in and shaping the orthography development process" and stakeholder authority meaning that orthographies inform and are supported by community research.
[TO CLEAR: Find an expert quotation, and cite it with a 100%-clean primary source.]
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Written by the Linguasphere desk. Classification data referred to here comes from the Linguasphere Register — see sources and attribution.