Many cultures never invent writing. From well-known 1969 research on 186 pre-industrial societies: [0]
* 39.2%: No writing
* 37.1%: Pictures only
* 23.7%: Writing
> I think we just haven’t found any of it that survived.
It's an interesting question, but do I think that? That's the thing about science - we need evidence. Otherwise, what we think turns out to be especially unreliable.
[0] George P. Murdock, D.R. White. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Ethnology (1969)
[1] Edmund Leach. Culture and Communication. Cambridge U. Press (1976)
In fact, there are used languages today that are not written!
I have family that just returned from a 2 year religious mission in pohnpei. The native language there is just barely starting to be written. One of the challenges to learning it is because of it's mostly unwritten nature, the language evolves rapidly. That fast evolution is part of what makes turning the language into a written language difficult.
This reminded me of how cyrillic was invented.
The Byzantines created the cyrillic alphabet in the 9th century so that they could write a bible for Slavic countries.
Blew my mind that they didn’t have an alphabet before that.
How is that different from the thousands of different languages that did not have alphabet until recently but then got one created by linguists or missionaries (or often someone who is a little bit of both[1])?
Cyril and Methodius (who created the Glagolithic Alphabet, not the Cyrillic alphabet) weren't even the first Chritian missionaries who created a new alphabet for a language that didn't have on in order to spread Christianity. I believe the first one was Armenian (in the early 5th century).
It similarly blows my mind how far back many languages go with written accounts. My own native language wasn't written down until the 16th century, so its earlier forms are basically unattested. And the 16th writing is just a few sentences in official records and translations of certain Christian prayers. It took until the late 17th century to have a translated Bible, and for the first non-religious texts to appear. Meanwhile some other languages spoken next door had centuries old literature by then.
That's what's mind-blowing to me about pohnpei. It's an island with an airport and internet. English is the official language but according to my relative the native language is what everyone uses day to day. It has about 40k residents. Literacy is 98%.
Yet with all that, the spoken language remains unwritten. That's just wild to me.
According to Wikipedia, the two most spoken indigenous languages on Pohnpei are written with the Latin alphabet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pohnpeian_language
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuukese_language
See the "phonology" and "orthography" sections of the respective articles. It seems like both have a standard orthography.
Very interesting.
Perhaps my family member confused the fact that the religion had no training materials for the language with there being no written version of the language. (I'm admittedly ignorant about this, I just had a conversation with them on Saturday)
I wonder if the language isn't as commonly written as it is spoken?
To be more precise, Glagolitic was the originally created script, with wholly original letter shapes.
Cyrillic was a later iteration by the Slavs themselves - Bulgarians, to be precise - where those new shapes were mostly replaced with Greek letters (except where there was no direct equivalent), presumably because those guys were translating a lot of Greek books, and having similar alphabets for both Greek and Church Slavonic made things easier.
> The Byzantines created the cyrillic alphabet in the 9th century so that they could write a bible for Slavic countries.
A bit similarly: English uses the Latin alphabet mainly because, as I recall, after the fall of Rome the Christian church was doing much of the writing in (England? Wales? British Isles?), and they adapted the Latin alphabet to the local languages.
For a while being literate in Western Europe was the equivalent of being able to write/read Latin. Also almost all the major languages in (somewhat) literate societies in Western Europe were were either dialects of Latin or in much closer contact with Latin countries than the Greek world (e.g. Ireland or Germany, I don't think we have much if any surviving non-Latin texts from Britain until quite late).