Talk:Spoken language

Linguistics Stub‑class High‑importance

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Making some changes

Hi, I am in a linguistics class and need to do a wiki edit for class credit. Would it be ok if I made some changes? I added a few wiki links to it already and am linking other pages to this one since it is a stub. I will be adding some more to the article if you are ok with it. Thanks Gansam12 (talk) 02:44, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I am also in the same linguistics class and group to be working on this wikipedia page. We plan to do our best in expanding this topic and making it better! I don't know a whole heck of a lot about editing wikipedia pages, or very much about linguistics, so it should be interesting. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rubytuesday90 (talk • contribs) 01:54, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, that's fine. Anyone can edit. But this is a bit of an odd topic, almost more of a dictionary entry. But knock yourself out, see what you can make of it. — kwami (talk) 04:54, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hello all, I am in the linguistics class as well. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up before I started adding/editing anything. Thanks for the support! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pondthoughts (talk • contribs) 20:44, 29 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Just another linguistics student here in on the same project. We'll see what we can do! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amjolley (talk • contribs) 16:36, 30 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, the recent changes were a WP:content fork with language and its other subarticles. No particular reason they should be here, and I doubt anyone would think to look for them here. — kwami (talk) 04:32, 1 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I am also with the linguistics class and I have added a section regarding the difference between spoken and written language with a subsection on early childhood development I found from two secondary sources. Please let me know if the changes do not meet your expectations and what I can do to change them. Thanks so much, Abueche (talk) 04:05, 7 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Better. Part of it was still off topic, and part that was on topic was more concerned with Tannen than about the topic. I cut the addition down to a paragraph, which I hope captures the gist of it. I think it would be valuable to illustrate the various points you made with examples. — kwami (talk) 06:31, 7 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Contrast with sign language

The present version of the article seems to have a POV in discounting the language of deaf people: the phrase "Modern linguistics regards the spoken language as the natural or the primary medium of human language for some obvious reasons" is particularly strange and I will delete it. --Mathew5000 20:16, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think they meant spoken as opposed to written, not oral as opposed to sign. It's now clear that that is what the stub is about. — kwami (talk) 04:33, 1 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Character

I read the article, which is brief but reasonably detailed for its technical purpose, but still walked away not understnding the general nature of spoken langauge. In other words, it does a great job of describing the concept, but almost does not at all describe spoken language. I was hoping to make a template of such a description from this article, but having come to the article itself I found only the technical detail. Does anyone else feel the article should characterize spoken language? — robbiemuﬃn ^{page talk} 17:49, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I definitely agree, and I think one way we could do that is to differentiate spoken language from written language in terms of character, also from speech in general. On the speech page there is an offhand mention of the controversy surrounding human speech vs. animal vocalizations, and we could mention how we command domesticated animals to "speak" but not to use spoken language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amjolley (talk • contribs) 16:44, 30 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Some more project-related changes.

I added a brief section which I believe increases the relevance of the page without over-padding it. Also I removed the paragraph about prosody in screenplays because its unrelated and not cited and the definition of diglossia because it is also uncited.