Spoken versus written language

A. Vocabulary. Spoken language makes use of a more limited vocabulary than written language. This is partly because writing allows the preservation of words over time. In spoken—that is, normal!— languages, old words die away.

1. The Lokele of the Democratic Republic of the Congo use a talking-drum language that has many words no one recalls the meanings of. There is no dictionary to preserve them the way ruth—the root of ruthless—is preserved in English dictionaries.

2. Spoken English makes use of a small subset of all the words in the language. Linguists Wallace Chafe and Jane Danielewicz have shown that even educated Americans use hedges to compensate for the difficulty of making maximal use of English vocabulary when speaking in real time, such as in this quote:

She was still young enough so I… I just… was able to put her in an… uh—sort of… sling… I mean one of those tummy packs… you know.

Languages only used orally tend to have thousands or maybe tens of thousands of words—not the hundreds of thousands that written languages hoard in dictionaries for eternal reference.

B. Syntax. Spoken language uses shorter, simpler sentences than written language. This is part of a folktale narrated by a speaker of Saramaccan Creole. Because this is spoken language, the sentences are rather short.