Asking about orthography gives us a sense of degrees in literacy. Asking about standardised orthography gives us a sense of how centralised the society is.
Orthography refers to any writing system.
The scale is as follows: - Yes, in a non-standardised way: language is written but there is no standardised way of writing and there is a lot of variation in how people use orthography. - Yes, in a standardised way: language is written and there is a standardised way of writing available, but there may still be some variation in to what extent people write in a standardised way. - No, the Focus Group language is not written: language is not written at all, or it may be written but writing in the Focus Group language is very rare and sporadic.
The following examples are from The Ethnologue (Eberhard et al. 2023) unless otherwise specified. - Rotokas speakers (North Bougainville, Papua New Guinea) use Latin script; it seems to have a standard ortography. The literacy rate of both L1 and L2 Rotokas speakers is 50–75%. - North Saami speakers (Uralic; Norway, Sweden, Finland) use Latin script. A spelling reform in 1979 resulted in a "pan-Scandinavian" standard orthography, meaning that the language is to be spelled the same way irrespective of the state where it is written (Östman 2011: 367). The Ethnologue lists the literacy rate of L1 North Saami speakers as 30–60% and L2 speakers as 75–100%. - Huichol speakers (Uto-Aztecan; Mexico) use Latin script; it appears to have a standard ortography.The literacy rate of L1 Huichol speakers is 5–10% and that of L2 speakers 5–15%. - Halh Mongolian speakers (Mongolic; Mongolia, Russian Federation) use both Cyrillic and Mongolian script; a standard ortography is in use. Mongolian script was used prior to 1941 and again since the 1990s. According to The Ethnologue, also Phags-pa script and Tibetan script were previously in use. - Lao speakers (Kra-Dai; Laos) use the standard Lao script. The literacy rate of L1 speakers is 30–60% and that of L2 speakers 50–75%. - Gujari speakers (Indo-European; India, Pakistan, Afghanistan) use primarily the Nastaliq variant of Arabic script. Also Devanagari script is used and there are plans for future development of using Devanagari to write the language. All in all, ortography seems to be used but in a non-standard way, although attempts at standardizing have been underway (see Losey 2002). The literacy rate of L2 speakers is 5–15%, but no figures are reported for L1 speakers. It appears that literacy rate of L1 speakers is fairly low: even in villages with education (which is unusual), fewer than half of the males and hardly any females had received any schooling (see Losey 2002: 6-7 and references there). - Adang speakers (Timor-Alor-Pantar; Indonesia) do not have a standard orthography. Children seem to be mostly educated in Indonesian (Haan 2001; Hamilton et al. 2013: 18). Literacy rate appears low but no figures are available.
This feature OL3 asks about the use of ortography. Asking about orthography serves different functions here. First, it is an alternative way of getting a sense of the degree in literacy. It is thus related to feature OL1, which asks directly about the rate of literacy. If an orthography is used for writing the language but not in a standardized way, this suggests at least some degree of literacy in that language. If standardised orthography is used for writing a language, this may also suggest a higher degree in literacy, although this is not necessarily always the case.
Second, asking about standard versus non-standard orthography may give a sense of how centralized and institutionalized language development is in the community. Standardization is a process that generally takes place in multilingual or multidialectal situations and it tends to reflect centralized and institutionalized practices of language development and planning. Through language planning, states govern the language policies and practices of their citizens. This usually involves status planning and acquisition planning (Wright 2012), which affect relationships between languages in multilingual situations, or in the minimum. Corpus planning may further draw awareness to contact-induced features, affecting language use in practice. If there is no standardised orthography for writing a language, it is likely that there is no centralized and institutionalized language planning efforts in the community, or the level of their social acceptance may not be high. If standardised orthography exists for writing a language, this may also suggests that there is institutionalized language development in the community, and may as well give a sense of how centralised the society is.
Third, the presence of standardized vs. non-standardized orthography may also be related to the dominating language ideology, and tie back to how centralized the society is. For instance, the Uto-Aztecan Western Mono community values internal diversity to the extent that variation is harnessed as a signal of family differences (Kroskrity 2023: 278). The communities are egalitarian, as is typical in small-scale multilingual societies. When the first language development project started in the 1982, all members of the Mono community were literate in English and many wrote in Mono although there was no shared tradition of writing in Mono (Kroskrity 2023: 286-291). The Mono have currently no standardized orthography and this may be seen as a reflection of their language ideology. The situation is very different in Tewa (Kiowa-Tanoan), whose language ideology could be characterized as indigeneous purism and whose multilingualism is not egalitarian but rather chartered, meaning that languages have specialized roles (Kroskrity 2023: 291-295). Under these circumstances, the Tewa have selected a committee that has developed language materials and standard orthography, reflecting thus a more centralized and institutionalized approach to language development compared to the Mono.