Editing Language (section)

==Modality==
Human languages display considerable plasticity<ref name=Evans>Nicholas Evans & Stephen Levinson (2009) 'The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science'. ''Behavioral and Brain Sciences'' 32, 429–492.</ref> in their deployment of two fundamental modes: oral (speech and [[mouthing]]) and manual (sign and gesture).{{refn|group=note|While sign is usually a visual medium, there is also [[tactile signing]]; and while oral speech is usually an aural medium, there is also [[lipreading]] and [[tadoma]].}} For example, it is common for oral language to be accompanied by gesture, and for sign language to be accompanied by [[mouthing]]. In addition, some language communities use both modes to convey lexical or grammatical meaning, each mode complementing the other. Such bimodal use of language is especially common in genres such as story-telling (with [[Plains Indian Sign Language]] and [[Australian Aboriginal sign languages]] used alongside oral language, for example), but also occurs in mundane conversation. For instance, many Australian languages have a rich set of [[grammatical case|case]] suffixes that provide details about the instrument used to perform an action. Others lack such grammatical precision in the oral mode, but supplement it with gesture to convey that information in the sign mode. In [[Iwaidja language|Iwaidja]], for example, 'he went out for fish using a torch' is spoken as simply "he-hunted fish torch", but the word for 'torch' is accompanied by a gesture indicating that it was held. In another example, the ritual language [[Damin]] had a heavily reduced oral vocabulary of only a few hundred words, each of which was very general in meaning, but which were supplemented by gesture for greater precision (e.g., the single word for fish, ''l*i''<!--this is Damin practical orthography for Evans' IPA [ɬ↓i]-->, was accompanied by a gesture to indicate the kind of fish).<ref>[[Nicholas Evans]] (2017) Listening Here: Ngûrrahmalkwonawoniyan. ''Humanities Australia'', Journal of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, vol 8, p 39.</ref>

Secondary modes of language, by which a fundamental mode is conveyed in a different medium, include [[writing]] (including [[braille]]), sign (in [[manually coded language]]), [[whistled language|whistling]] and [[talking drum|drumming]]. Tertiary modes – such as [[semaphore]], [[Morse code]] and [[spelling alphabet]]s – convey the secondary mode of writing in a different medium. For some extinct languages that are maintained for ritual or liturgical purposes, writing may be the primary mode, with speech secondary.