ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the applied linguistics of literacy – the written forms of language and associated practices developed by readers and writers. As human inventions go, writing systems are quite recent, dating back perhaps 5,000 or 6,000 years – roughly the same length of time that humans have been cultivating staple crops like corn and wheat, but not as long as rice (10,000 years) or other key human inventions:
n beer (first brewed some 10,000 years ago in China); n human portraits and fish hooks (Italy, 14,000 years); n woven clothing (about 25,000 years); n musical instruments (the flute, 35,000 years, in Germany); n home decorating (the earliest known cave paintings, in Australia, date back
nearly 40,000 years); n lipstick (70,000 years, Blombos Cave, South Africa).
