African newspapers could be important conduits for debates around language and identity; more than that, newspapers were often the very crucible through which new African languages emerged. This chapter tells the twentieth-century story of the emergence of a codified written form of siSwati, the vernacular language of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). Yet the appearance of siSwati was far from straightforward, and it appeared relatively late in the day, only around the 1960s. Earlier Swati intellectuals had largely used the language of neighbouring South Africa – isiZulu – for their print innovations. By the 1950s, a new interest in a written form of siSwati emerged in step with nationalist aspirations. Yet evidence from African-language newspapers shows us that the development of siSwati was fraught, dissent-filled, and uneven. The periodic and decentralized nature of the mid-century African newspaper made these kinds of debates possible, reminding us of the important orthographic work accomplished by print periodicals.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of books and printing in English, in four sections defined by time period. Each section briefly surveys the technological innovations of that period and discusses how the changing print industry influenced and reflected developments of English between 1476 and the present. After an introduction (7.1), Section 7.2 discusses the rise of print in England during the incunabula and early print period (1476–1640). Section 7.3 then follows the continued expansion of print across England and North America during the hand-press period (1641–c. 1800), and Section 7.4 considers the explosion of printed texts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final section culminates with an overview of the rise of digital reading platforms and a discussion of how the ongoing evolution of text technologies continues to influence the development of English today.

The chapter is divided into two parts, focusing on historiography and methodology, respectively, and linked by a survey of the functions of punctuation over time. The historiographical part offers a discussion on the principles of written language, the fundamental representational principles and functional designs in the history of English orthography, and the system and status of Present-Day English orthography in terms of the main historical lines as seen from structural as well as sociolinguistic viewpoints. The emphasis in the methodological part is on the development of new approaches and methodologies based on the expanding digitisation of historical texts that have grown in interdisciplinary ways out of the traditional philological paradigm – research primarily using large digital datasets and corpus-driven methodologies, as well as exploring the data in innovative ways to chart sociolinguistic networks.

You have used IPA to document your language’s words and their features, but this chapter introduces other options for writing your conlang, beginning with a brief overview of different types of writing systems. The second section introduces romanization strategies, which utilize standard keyboard characters to represent sounds in a language. The third section discusses how you can adapt an existing orthography to your conlang, provided it makes sense for your speakers to have access to that existing orthography. Finally, the fourth section discusses the process of creating a unique orthography if that is the direction you want to take for your language. By the end of this chapter, you will decide how you might romanize your language and whether you will use an orthography to represent the written form of your language.

Five examples which appear to show morphophonemic alternations are considered, but none of them is straightforward. In some cases, the application of the apparently morphophonemic rule is not regular, in others the alternations turn out to be orthographic rather than phonological.

In this first full chapter readers will find a general survey of those aspects of Balkan geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic history that are most relevant for the present study, including the Balkans in relation to the Ottoman Empire. We locate the Balkans geographically, describing its physical characteristics and discussing the controversy over where its northern limits are to be located. Various other extralinguistic factors are discussed that are relevant for the linguistic situation. Most importantly, the languages of the Balkans are introduced as to their genealogical affiliation, their historical attestation, their documentation, their pertinent representation in scholarly literature, their dialectology, their social setting, and related matters, including associated writing systems. For the sake of completeness, all languages found in the Balkans, from ancient to early modern, are given some attention, creating a comprehensive account of the geographically determined languages of the Balkans; ultimately, though, the focus is narrowed to the Balkan languages, i.e. those languages in the region that significantly (or in any attested fashion) display the morphosyntactic and other convergence phenomena that are central to the concept of a contact area, i.e. to a sprachbund.

This chapter reviews evidence that the orthographic forms (spellings) of L2 sounds and words affect L2 phonological representation and processing. Orthographic effects are found in speech perception, speech production, phonological awareness, and the learning of words and sounds. Orthographic forms facilitate L2 speakers/listeners – for instance in lexical learning – but also have negative effects, resulting in sound additions, deletions, and substitutions. This happens because L2 speakers’ L2 orthographic knowledge differs from the actual working of the L2 writing system. Orthographic effects are established after little exposure to orthographic forms, are persistent, can be reinforced by factors other than orthography, including spoken input, and are modulated by individual-level and sound/word-level variables. Future research should address gaps in current knowledge, for instance investigating the effects of teaching interventions, and aim at producing a coherent framework.

In this chapter, we thoroughly describe the L2LP model, its five ingredients to explain speech development from first contact with a language or dialect (initial state) to proficiency comparable to a native speaker of the language or dialect (ultimate attainment), and its empirical, computational, and statistical method. We present recent studies comparing different types of bilinguals (simultaneous and sequential) and explaining their differential levels of ultimate attainment in different learning scenarios. We also show that although the model has the word “perception” in its name, it was designed to also explain phonological development in general, including lexical development, speech production, and orthographic effects. The chapter demonstrates that the L2LP model can be regarded as a comprehensive theoretical, computational, and probabilistic model or framework for explaining how we learn the phonetics and phonology of multiple languages (sequentially or simultaneously) with variable levels of language input throughout the life span.

This chapter begins by highlighting southern African archaeology’s importance at a global level, stressing the enormous time-depth over which hominins have been present in the region, the diversity of its archaeological record, and the contributions that this has made and continues to make to broader debates within archaeology and anthropology. Next, it indicates key changes made here relative to the first edition of this book in 2002 and then identifies the main sources of evidence available for reconstructing southern Africa’s past. These include archaeology, palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental science, ethnographic data, historical linguistics, genetics, and oral and written histories. The chapter then introduces the overall structure of the book, ending with a discussion and justification of some key matters of nomenclature regarding how southern Africa’s varied inhabitants have been/should be called. Guidance is also given on matters of orthography relative to sounds not used in English.

Most Slavic orthographies are relatively shallow, relying on phonemic and morphological principles; other orthographic principles play minor roles. However, some orthographies with a rather unbroken tradition give the historical principle a certain role (like Polish or Czech); others rely heavily on the morphological principle (like Russian or to some extent Bulgarian). In some minor details (like comma rules or quotation marks) one can see different external influences, especially French and German. In the ways writing systems were adapted, the major split is between languages written in Cyrillic and those written in Latin. In the Latin alphabet, the main devices used are diacritics (nowadays especially those introduced by the Hussites) and digraphs, whereas Cyrillic hardly has diacritics or digraphs at all but uses special letters created from ligatures or with diacritic elements or borrowed from a different script. Spelling reforms over the course of history have generally strengthened the phonemic principle, unified orthography for a language, or increased or decreased differences vis-à-vis other languages in line with the political situation.

In this chapter, we explore how our brains help us read and understand written words. Imagine when you started school – you could talk, recognize some letters, and start to hear the sounds in words. These skills lay the groundwork for learning to read. Good language skills make it easier to learn to read. But heres the twist: our brains werent originally built for reading. Weve only been reading for a few thousand years, while weve been using spoken language for tens of thousands of years. So, our brains adapted to this new skill of reading. We also discuss a special part of the brain called the visual word form area that helps us recognize words. We explore how reading changes our brains and why its crucial to have both good language skills and a writing system around to help us become readers. Dyslexia, a reading difficulty, is also discussed. In simple terms, well uncover how our brains enable us to read by adapting to new cultural practices, like writing, and how they use our visual system to make reading possible.

The identification of Assyrian personal names in Babylonian sources poses a challenge because there is a considerable degree of overlap between the name repertoires of Babylonia and Assyria in the first millennium BCE. As a first step, this chapter identifies three relevant categories of names attested in Babylonian sources: distinctively Assyrian names, distinctively Babylonian names, and names common to both Assyria and Babylonia. The next step is to isolate names belonging to the first category: those that are distinctively Assyrian. To this end, the chapter identifies four diagnostic features which may occur separately or in combination: (i) Assyrian divine elements; (ii) Assyrian toponyms; (iii) Assyrian dialectal forms, and (iv) vocabulary particular to the Neo-Assyrian onomasticon. Orthography and phonology, including the treatment of sibilants, are further considerations. The chapter also addresses the historical background since this provides important context for investigating the presence of Assyrian name-bearers in Babylonia, both before and after the fall of Assyria in 612 BCE.

Chapter 10 describes how differences between a learner’s first language(s) and the target language(s) may influence their learning experience. Concepts like crosslinguistic transfer, grapheme-phoneme correspondence, and typography are presented through a variety of exemplars. Research-based strategies on how to teach a new writing system, introduce text-based resources featuring unfamiliar scripts, and differentiate instruction based on learners’ linguistic backgrounds are provided.