The Environment Envir. Not Indexed When we think of the history of language, we often think first of writing. English departments are based on literature, and a bachelor's degree in French is most often a degree in French literature, with the spoken language occupying a secondary role.
Literacy is a gauge of one's language ability.
The written word has been imbued with prestige and authority. We learn grammar from written texts, and in fact, different grammatical rules apply to the spoken versus the written language. Now read the above sentence out loud. Further, spoken language is filled with 'gonna', 'wanna', 'yeah', and others, but these are rarely written. Linguists are generally interested in spoken language because only when we speak do we use our language naturally.