The evolution of writing systems

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the investigation of graphemic systems both from a linguistic point of view and in a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective. Many different aspects have been addressed in the recent literature: the semiotic nature of writing systems (e. g. Morin et al. 2018), the emergence of writing systems in the realworld aswell as in laboratory settings (e. g. Garrod et al. 2010, Kelly et al. forthc.), neurocognitive processes determining the development of writing systems (e. g. Dehaene 2009), sociohistoric, cognitive, and cultural factors that influence diachronic changes in written language (e. g. Baddeley and Voeste 2012; Condorelli 2020), as well as the interface between writing, phonology and morphology (e. g. Fuhrhop and Schmidt 2014; Fuhrhop et al. 2017; Caro Reina and Engel 2020). This special issue of Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft brings together typological, empirical, and cross-linguistic studies investigating the diachronic development of writing systems. It is based on the workshop of the same title held at the annual conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS, the Linguistic Society of Germany), March 4–6, 2020, in Hamburg. The aim of the present special issue is to shed new light on the dynamics of graphemic systems, taking into account the interaction of written language with different linguistic and social settings. Covering a broad range of writing systems in both European andnon-European languages andat different diachronic stages, the contributions in this issue are situated within the central research fields of grapholinguistics: – the typology of writing systems, – linguistic, typographic, social and cultural factors in graphemic variation, – punctuation, from a diachronic and cross-linguistic perspective, – measuring graphemic variation.