Processing Semitic writing systems: Introduction to a special issue of Writing Systems Research

Abstract

“Humankind is defined by language, civilization is defined by writing” (Daniels, 1996). Modern civilisation is defined by mass literacy, first made possible by the invention of printing, and today, the electronic media and the internet. A reflection of the civilising aspects of literacy is the well-known correlation between overall literacy levels of a society and its social and economic well-being. The study of literacy has captured the attention of scholars from every discipline concerned with human behaviour, from genetics and neurobiology to cultural studies. At the centre-point of this spectrum, psychologists and linguists seek to illuminate the foundational processes of reading and writing, the units of language represented in writing and how humans go about processing these forms. While reading researchers have long acknowledged that writing represents language, only recently have they come to appreciate that writing is not a mere shadowy reflection of spoken language but a free-standing independent variable in the literacy equation (see, e.g., Olson, 1994). The exciting new field of writing systems research and the cross-disciplinary insights emerging from this work hold great promise for the field of literacy research. In this special issue we present papers from the first Haifa Conference on Writing Systems and Literacy, which took place in April 2012. The location of the conference is significant for several reasons. First, the Middle East was the birthplace of segmental writing systems (first developed nearly four thousand years ago by Semitic speakers) and the progenitor of writing systems—abjads, alphabets and alphasyllabaries, now used daily by billions (Daniels & Bright, 1996; Diringer, 1968; Naveh, 1975). Second, the Semitic languages spoken in the Middle East do not belong to the Indo-European family of languages (that includes English) that have so dominated the language and literacy research agenda (Share, 2008). Most of the world’s languages are not English-like (Evans & Levinson, 2009), and most readers and writers around the world use writing systems that are neither alphabetic (i.e., full and equal status for consonant and vowel signs) nor European. Third, as a result of social and historical events, a sizeable proportion of the population in Israel uses two or more different writing systems on a daily basis. This phenomenon has generated intense interest in research on reading and writing with different orthographies. The conference brought together researchers from a variety of disciplines on reading and literacy learning including psycholinguists, neuropsychologists and linguists. Interestingly, all but one of the papers included in this issue focus on reading and writing in Arabic. The reasons for this are many. First, whereas illiteracy and poverty go hand in hand in most parts of Asia and Africa, curiously, in the Arabic-speaking world, literacy levels are uniformly and distressingly low in wealthy and impoverished societies alike. Even highly educated expert readers of Arabic read their native Arabic more slowly than they read non-native languages such as English, Hindi or Arabic’s Semitic cousin Hebrew. Why is literacy learning so difficult in Arabic? Recently, research on literacy acquisition in Arabic has burgeoned, perhaps as an antidote to the many years in which this topic was WRITING SYSTEMS RESEARCH, 2013 Vol. 5, No. 2, 131–133, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17586801.2013.863086