If speech is central to language, why do modern societies treat writing as the ultimate form of knowledge?
Part of the answer lies in why humans invented writing systems in the first place. Writing allowed information to be recorded for posterity, freed memory from having to carry everything around, and enabled administrative and scientific systems to expand.
Writing also became a tool of power – from the management of empires to the spread of colonial governance. For instance, the so-called “conquest” of the Americas by Spain was greatly facilitated by the publication, in 1492, of Nebrija’s Grammar of Castilian which facilitated the task of imposing the Spanish language to the detriment of Indigenous ancestral languages.
Over time, Western institutions came to treat written language as the primary vehicle of knowledge. Universities, bureaucracies and courts all operate through documents. Written scholarship became the gold standard of learning and authority.
Even our most famous dictionaries relied on writing. The Oxford English Dictionary was built through generations of volunteers who read texts and submitted written examples of words in use.
Education followed the same model. Students read books, wrote essays and were assessed through written exams. From medieval monastic libraries such as the Old Library at All Souls College, Oxford to modern universities, writing became synonymous with thinking.
Today, that model is under significant pressure.
The emergence of large language models has unsettled longstanding assumptions about writing and learning. If a machine can generate coherent essays in seconds, how can educators be sure students are doing the intellectual work themselves?
This has sparked renewed interest in something linguists have always considered to be primary: speech.
Some scholars now argue universities should place greater emphasis on oral assessment – conversations, presentations and live examinations – where students explain their thinking in real time. Once that understanding is demonstrated, AI tools could still assist with shaping the final written output.
In this sense, new technology may be pushing education back toward one of the oldest forms of knowledge exchange: spoken dialogue.
A renewed emphasis on speech may have other benefits too.
Written academic English often acts as a gatekeeper, particularly for multilingual students whose most dominant language is not English. Many people can think, analyse and debate complex ideas more effectively in their first language than in the global language of academia.
Emerging technologies increasingly allow students to brainstorm orally in their own language, then translate or refine their ideas into written English. In theory, this could make academic spaces more linguistically inclusive.
According to some, artificial intelligence may end up amplifying something deeply human: our capacity to think through conversation.
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