Keeping the Word: On Orality and Literacy (With a Sideways Glance at Navajo)

This article investigates the relationship between "orality" and "literacy." I take as my starting point the discussion by Walter Ong (1982) of the shift in "consciousness" that resulted from the movement from an "oral culture" to a "literate culture." I discuss a number of specific examples of the relationship between orality and literacy. My purpose in these examples is to suggest that literacy and orality are kinds of specific linguistic ideologies (see Silverstein 1979) and that we need a much more complex understanding of literacy as an ideological position than Ong has offered. In this article, I wish to explore orality and literacy as complex and interacting notions. My purpose is not so much as to critique Ong (though there will be some of that), but rather to elaborate what we might mean by "orality" and "literacy" as on the ground, linguacultural phenomena (see Friedrich 1989).