The written language bias in linguistics and language sciences

In Linell (1982) and later, I have argued that there is a ‘written language bias’ (WLB) which has governed thinking within linguistics from its inception almost up to the present day. This bias, which is nearly omnipresent in linguistics, has been discussed by Taylor (1997) under the label of ‘scriptism’, i.e. ‘the influence of writing on the conceptualization of speech’ (p. 52) within language theory.1