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• Spoken English

The ways in which the English language is transmitted through a conventional system of sounds. Compare to written English. Spoken English, says linguist David Crystal, is "the more natural and widespread mode of transmission, though ironically the one which most people find much less familiar--presumably because it is so much more difficult to 'see' what is happening in speech than in writing" (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed., 2003). In recent years, linguists have found it easier to "'see' what is happening in speech" through the availability of corpus resources--computerized databases containing "real life" examples of both spoken and written English. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999) is a contemporary reference grammar of English based on a large-scale corpus.