Ayumi Kubo / Unsplash

Celeste Rodriguez Louro , The University of Western Australia

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

After four decades researching language and linguistics, that response now seems almost absurd. But it reflects a common bias among those of us raised in text-based cultures. We tend to view written language as the ultimate form of expression, knowledge transmission and even thinking itself.

Yet linguists know that speech comes first – historically, developmentally and cognitively.

Writing is a relatively recent technological invention layered on top of something much older and more fundamental.…