Spoken and written language

We will now move to explain the nature of spoken and written language.

Speech, or spoken language is the most obvious aspect and the universal material of human language. For many hundreds of thousands of years, human language was transmitted and developed entirely as spoken means of communication.

Referring to the nature of the spoken language we find that, on the one hand, phonetics is the description and classification of speech sounds. On the same, we could find three different types: Articulatory phonetics (the production of sounds), Acoustic phonetics (the transmission of speech sound waves), and Auditory phonetics (the perception or reception of speech sound waves). On the other hand, phonology is the classification of the sounds within the system of a particular language or languages and it is interested in phonemes. Therefore, the study of the speech is the field of both phonetics and phonology.

Finally, referring to the nature of the written language, we can classify writing systems into two types: Non-phonological systems (do not show a clear relationship between the symbols and the sounds of the language) and Phonological systems (do show a clear relationship between the symbols and the sounds of language).