ABSTRACT
Before we can begin to get a sense of what ‘spelling’ is, we need to have some sense about this thing we call ‘language’. As I shall show, it isn’t at all clear what we mean by language, or what is included and what is excluded for different people and in various theories under that label. That makes it difficult to know what is to be included in ‘spelling’ and what is not. This seemingly simple word spelling proves to be quite a problem. So do we actually know what language is? Once we have a settled sense about that, we may be able to get nearer to a sense of what kinds of things are included in this activity called spelling, a sense of what it is that gets or could be spelled.
