Literary language
A
literary language is a
register of a
language that is used in
writing, and which often differs in
lexicon and
syntax from the language used in speech. In some languages, such as
Tamil, the difference is so extreme that the language exhibits
diglossia.
English has such a register. Consider this
sentence::
Few people would speak such a sentence aloud, unless they were reading from a prepared text.Now think about this::
There are hardly any real life situations where somebody's going to open their mouth, and the first thing that comes out is "Consider this sentence".The second sentence attempts to mimic more closely the usage of a particular form of spoken English as it contrasts with written English.
Comparing the two, it is apparent that literary English differs from spoken English in a number of particulars.
* It is "formal;" which is to say, it is an
acrolect.
Contractions and similar spoken forms are avoided or are written out in full.
* It uses a different lexicon.
* It observes the rules of
prescriptive grammar much more attentively/effectively than spoken English.
* It has a simplified syntax. This observation seems counterintuitive at first. Written documents may well contain
complex sentences that contain multiple subordinate
clauses and similar grammatical features. However, their basic structure tends to break down into simple
subjects and
predicates.
Pronouns tend not to proliferate in writing as they do in speech; the methods of voice
inflection and other disambiguating devices that clarify their referents are not available in writing. Long emphatic
negating phrases like
there aren't hardly any seldom occur in literary English, because while they seem more
colloquial, they are syntactically complex. They too can be disambiguated in speech much more easily than in writing.
Likewise, native readers and writers of English are often unaware that the complexities of
English spelling make written English a somewhat artificial construct. The traditional spelling of English, at least for inherited words, preserves a late
Middle English phonology that is no one's speech dialect; the artificial preservation of this much earlier form of the language in writing might make much of what we write intelligible to
Chaucer, even if we could not understand his speech. When written language comes to be strongly divergent from spoken language, the resulting situation is called
diglossia. Tom McArthur suggests that it is at least arguable that written and spoken English have reached that stage.
Other languages have similar traditions of literary language. The longer a literary tradition a language has, the likelier there is to be disconnection between speech and writing. In
Greek, up until the middle of the
twentieth century, Greek writers wrote in a style that they called the
katharevousa, a style based on ancient Greek; and even when the
katharevousa came to be relatively neglected as a norm, Greek writing still preserves old
diphthongs and other
graphemes which have been merged in spoken (or
demotic) Greek. Likewise, written
French continues to mark noun and verb forms that no longer affect the pronunciation. Through the centuries of a widely differing gulf between
vulgar Latin and ultimately the
Romance languages, Latin continued to be written, attempting to imitate the model of
classical Latin; when you spelled your local Romance language correctly and used proper grammar, classical Latin was what came out, and that was what you wrote down. The fact that classical Latin was unintelligible to the populace, and should no longer be used in
homilies, was not acknowledged by the
Roman Catholic Church until the
Council of Tours in
814.
In
Javanese,
Malay, and
Japanese, special literary or formal words and grammatical constructions substitute for
vernacular expressions in literary style. There are a number of explicit grades of formality in these languages, and moving from one to another is marked much more strongly in the grammar than it is in English. In Javanese, there are
alphabet characters derived from the alphabets used to write
Sanskrit, no longer in ordinary use, that are used in literary words as a mark of respect. Literary
Chinese tends to a density of expression that is much greater than spoken Chinese. Literary
Arabic, based on the standard of the
Qur'an, continues to function as a
lingua franca throughout the Arab world despite the often strongly differing varieties of local Arabic
vernaculars.
*Crystal, David (ed.),
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge, 2003) ISBN 0521530334
*McArthur, Tom (ed.),
The Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford, 1992), ISBN 0192806378
*McArthur, Tom,
The English Languages (Cambridge, 1998) ISBN 0521485827
*
Classical language*
Official language*
Sacred language*
Standard language*
List of languages by first written accounts
