This chapter begins by highlighting southern African archaeology’s importance at a global level, stressing the enormous time-depth over which hominins have been present in the region, the diversity of its archaeological record, and the contributions that this has made and continues to make to broader debates within archaeology and anthropology. Next, it indicates key changes made here relative to the first edition of this book in 2002 and then identifies the main sources of evidence available for reconstructing southern Africa’s past. These include archaeology, palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental science, ethnographic data, historical linguistics, genetics, and oral and written histories. The chapter then introduces the overall structure of the book, ending with a discussion and justification of some key matters of nomenclature regarding how southern Africa’s varied inhabitants have been/should be called. Guidance is also given on matters of orthography relative to sounds not used in English.

Most Slavic orthographies are relatively shallow, relying on phonemic and morphological principles; other orthographic principles play minor roles. However, some orthographies with a rather unbroken tradition give the historical principle a certain role (like Polish or Czech); others rely heavily on the morphological principle (like Russian or to some extent Bulgarian). In some minor details (like comma rules or quotation marks) one can see different external influences, especially French and German. In the ways writing systems were adapted, the major split is between languages written in Cyrillic and those written in Latin. In the Latin alphabet, the main devices used are diacritics (nowadays especially those introduced by the Hussites) and digraphs, whereas Cyrillic hardly has diacritics or digraphs at all but uses special letters created from ligatures or with diacritic elements or borrowed from a different script. Spelling reforms over the course of history have generally strengthened the phonemic principle, unified orthography for a language, or increased or decreased differences vis-à-vis other languages in line with the political situation.

In this chapter, we explore how our brains help us read and understand written words. Imagine when you started school – you could talk, recognize some letters, and start to hear the sounds in words. These skills lay the groundwork for learning to read. Good language skills make it easier to learn to read. But heres the twist: our brains werent originally built for reading. Weve only been reading for a few thousand years, while weve been using spoken language for tens of thousands of years. So, our brains adapted to this new skill of reading. We also discuss a special part of the brain called the visual word form area that helps us recognize words. We explore how reading changes our brains and why its crucial to have both good language skills and a writing system around to help us become readers. Dyslexia, a reading difficulty, is also discussed. In simple terms, well uncover how our brains enable us to read by adapting to new cultural practices, like writing, and how they use our visual system to make reading possible.

The identification of Assyrian personal names in Babylonian sources poses a challenge because there is a considerable degree of overlap between the name repertoires of Babylonia and Assyria in the first millennium BCE. As a first step, this chapter identifies three relevant categories of names attested in Babylonian sources: distinctively Assyrian names, distinctively Babylonian names, and names common to both Assyria and Babylonia. The next step is to isolate names belonging to the first category: those that are distinctively Assyrian. To this end, the chapter identifies four diagnostic features which may occur separately or in combination: (i) Assyrian divine elements; (ii) Assyrian toponyms; (iii) Assyrian dialectal forms, and (iv) vocabulary particular to the Neo-Assyrian onomasticon. Orthography and phonology, including the treatment of sibilants, are further considerations. The chapter also addresses the historical background since this provides important context for investigating the presence of Assyrian name-bearers in Babylonia, both before and after the fall of Assyria in 612 BCE.

Chapter 10 describes how differences between a learner’s first language(s) and the target language(s) may influence their learning experience. Concepts like crosslinguistic transfer, grapheme-phoneme correspondence, and typography are presented through a variety of exemplars. Research-based strategies on how to teach a new writing system, introduce text-based resources featuring unfamiliar scripts, and differentiate instruction based on learners’ linguistic backgrounds are provided.

The chapter ’Linguistic Scratching Posts’ looks at how to analyse the collected data to describe a linguistic variety. Taking a dialectological approach, it shows lexical, morphological, and orthographical variation in a list of cat-related keywords. It also uses the categories of the feline purrspective and the human perspective, which illustrate the semantic variation in cat-related digital spaces. All the categories are listed with examples from the data. To show the vastness of the number of users and posts we are dealing with, the chapter provides some statistics for the four social media platforms from which the data was collected: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

The English language is the world’s first – and so far, only – global language. There are various reasons for this, including that it was the language used historically in the British Empire: the most powerful and extensive empire the world has ever seen. English is also the language exported to the world by the United States of America, through its economic, military, cultural and scientific power for the past century (Singh, 2005). This has resulted in English having high utility as a lingua franca, or a ‘common’ language, which is very useful as a means of communication between people and nations who typically do not share any other language. Consequently, English is learned and/or spoken to some extent by between 1.5–2 billion people today – or around one-quarter of the world’s population (Crystal, 2009, pp.61–9).

Chapter 7: Reading Different Languages. This chapter outlines differences in learning to read in differing L1s. Linguistic differences, or linguistic distance, between any given L1 and L2 will be a factor to consider in L2 reading development. The study of linguistic differences when reading across languages also leads to identifying universal linguistic aspects of reading development. The chapter focuses more specifically on differing orthographic systems, from alphabetic systems to morpho-syllabic systems as well as mixed systems. A major source of variation within alphabetic systems is the concept of orthographic depth between orthography and phonology. English is the most opaque orthographic language and, in that respect, is an outlier among languages of the world. Other factors in word recognition development include the informational density of a given orthography, word reading time, and morphological processing. The many differences across languages also impact L1 to L2 reading transfer. The chapter closes with a discussion of reading universals in relation to L1 to L2 reading transfer and provides a set of implications for instruction.

Growing up multilingually and in a multilingual social environment affects the acquisition of literacy. Many multilingual children learn to read and write in the language required by the institutional context. This is often a second, sometimes unfamiliar, language for them and it is the dominant language of the society they live in. However, these children might also learn, or be in contact with, other written languages used in their families and communities. The practices in all written languages vary, and family or community languages and literacies might be typologically close or distant from the language and literacy practices expected at school, which is the main institution for literacy acquisition. Unfolding the resources and needs of multilingual children’s literacy acquisition is at the center of this chapter. The contexts of literacy acquisition in multilingual societies is presented on three different levels: by defining literacy and literacies, by presenting different multilingual and multiliterate contexts, and by zooming in on one aspect of literacy, that is, spelling.

Discussion of English segments, both vowels and consonants, and their representation in terms of distinctive features.

It is true that most teachers have limited knowledge of how words work in English. Linguistics hasn’t been a feature of their own schooling or their teacher education, and you can’t teach what you don’t know. The good news is that it isn’t hard to build the knowledge – in fact, it’s fun. In this chapter we look more closely at the linguistic threads that contribute to the rich tapestry of each word: etymology, orthography, phonology and morphology.

Chapter 3 outlined four key principles for teaching spelling: start with meaning; teach spelling explicitly; teach a repertoire of spelling knowledge; and integrate spelling instruction into all subject areas. This chapter introduces a 10-step process for planning and implementing a spelling program that is grounded in those four principles. Interspersed among the steps in the planning process are some of the questions teachers and parents frequently ask as they embark on the implementation process. What would your answers be? My responses are posted at the end of the chapter.

This chapter is focused on getting spelling assessment right, and expands upon steps 9 and 10 in the program planning process, introduced in chapter 4: assessing spelling in use, and keeping records of teaching and learning.

Chapter 2 described how words work in English, and provided guidance on what to teach in spelling. Just as important as knowing what to teach is knowing how to teach, and that is the focus of this chapter. Many teachers simply teach spelling the way they were taught – through a list of words to be learned for an end-of-week assessment. However, research shows that this is an ineffective way to learn to spell. This chapter outlines four key principles for teaching spelling, each based on what the research tells us about how we learn to spell. 1 Start with meaning. 2 Teach spelling explicitly. 3 Teach a repertoire of spelling knowledge. 4 Integrate spelling instruction across all subject areas.