How Do You Learn a Language With No Writing System?

This isn’t just a hypothetical puzzle; it’s the daily reality for field linguists who work to document and preserve the world’s linguistic diversity. They can’t buy a textbook or download a “Pirahã for Dummies” PDF. Instead, they rely on a toolkit of techniques that are part scientific investigation, part deep human connection. It’s a process that takes us back to the very fundamentals of how we communicate.

From Textbooks to Talk: The First Encounter

The first step is a radical mental shift. A linguist must abandon their reliance on visual information and tune their brain to a purely auditory frequency. They are about to hear sounds, words, and grammatical structures that may be completely alien to their native tongue, all without the anchor of a written word.

Early sessions aren’t about holding a conversation. They are about data collection, a process known as elicitation. The most straightforward method, often called the “monolingual method”, is deceptively simple: point and ask. The linguist points to a rock, a tree, a river, or their own foot and asks the native speaker (referred to as a language consultant), “What is this”?

The consultant says the word. The linguist listens intently, attempts to mimic the sounds, and records everything. This process is slow, painstaking, and requires immense patience from both parties. The goal is to build a foundational vocabulary, one concrete noun at a time.

Building trust and rapport with the language consultant and their community is paramount. The linguist is not just a data collector; they are a guest, and the language they are learning is a cherished part of a culture’s identity. Without a strong, respectful relationship, the work is impossible.

The Linguist’s Secret Weapon: Phonetic Transcription

As the linguist listens to these new words, they face a critical problem: how to write them down accurately? The English alphabet is woefully inadequate for capturing the sounds of all the world’s languages. This is where the linguist’s most powerful tool comes into play: the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

Think of the IPA as a universal catalog of every possible sound the human vocal tract can produce. Each sound has a unique symbol. This allows a linguist to:

• Capture unfamiliar sounds: Does the language have clicks, like those found in the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa? Or ejective consonants, which are produced with a sharp burst of air? The IPA has symbols for them.
• Distinguish subtle differences: In English, the ‘p’ in “pin” is aspirated (followed by a puff of air), while the ‘p’ in “spin” is not. For us, it’s the same letter. But in a language like Thai, this difference can completely change a word’s meaning. The IPA allows the linguist to note this crucial distinction.
• Be consistent: Using the IPA ensures that any other linguist can look at their notes and know exactly how a word was pronounced.

The linguist listens to a word over and over, often using high-quality audio recordings, and transcribes it into IPA. This phonetic transcription is the first “writing” the language gets, even if it’s just in the linguist’s private notebook.

Building Blocks: From Sounds to Sentences

With a collection of transcribed words, the real puzzle-solving begins. The linguist acts like a detective, looking for patterns to figure out the language’s grammar.

First comes morphology—the study of how words are built. The linguist might elicit sentences to see how words change:

• “This is one dog”.
• “These are two dogs”.
• “I see the dog”.
• “The dog sees me”.

By comparing the transcriptions, they can identify the small pieces, or morphemes, that signal plurality, possession, or the subject of a sentence. They might discover that the language adds a suffix to make a noun plural, or a prefix to a verb to show who is doing the action.

Next comes syntax—the rules of sentence structure. Does the language follow the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order of English (“The woman eats the fish”)? Or is it Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) like Japanese and Turkish (“The woman the fish eats”)? Or perhaps the much rarer Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) of Welsh (“Eats the woman the fish”)? Eliciting and comparing simple, transitive sentences reveals these fundamental blueprints.

Beyond Words: The Power of Cultural Immersion

You can analyze sounds and grammar in a vacuum for only so long. Language is inextricably woven into the fabric of culture, and for an unwritten language, there is no substitute for living it.

Cultural immersion is not an optional extra; it is essential. A linguist must live within the community, share meals, participate in daily activities, and observe social interactions. This is how they learn the things that can never be elicited by pointing at an object.

• Pragmatics: How is language actually used? What are the rules for politeness? What is considered taboo? How do you address an elder versus a child?
• Metaphor and Idiom: Every language is rich with expressions that make no literal sense. You can’t understand them without understanding the cultural references they draw upon.
• Worldview: The language may encode a worldview completely different from the linguist’s. For example, some languages, like Guugu Yimithirr in Australia, don’t use relative terms like “left” and “right”. Instead, they use absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west). A speaker would say, “There’s a bug on your south leg”. Learning this requires a complete reorientation of one’s perception of space.

By living the language, the linguist moves from being an analyst to becoming a user. The abstract rules of grammar become a living, breathing tool for connection and understanding. The work of learning an unwritten language is, therefore, one of the most profound acts of cross-cultural communication imaginable. It’s a slow, challenging, and deeply human endeavor to understand not just what people are saying, but how they see the world.