Linguists routinely emphasise the primacy of speech over writing. Yet, most linguists have analysed spoken language, as well as language in general, applying theories and methods that are best suited for written language. Accordingly, there is an extensive 'written language bias' in traditional and present day linguistics and other language sciences. In this book, this point is argued with rich and convincing evidence from virtually all fields of linguistics.

Part One: Preliminaries 1. Introduction 2. From aspects of communicative action to sets of abstract forms 3. Speech and writing, spoken and written language 4. The written language bias in linguistics Part Two: The Phenomenon and its Extension 5. The written language bias in 101 points Part Three: Discussion 6. The transformations of some written language-based themes 7. Critique of the written language bias arguments 8. People's languages and linguists' grammars 9. The written language bias - past, present, future