thumb|upright=1.35|Adult literacy rates, 2023

Literacy is the ability to read and write, and illiteracy is the inability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of literacy as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was understood solely as alphabetical literacy (understanding the meanings of words without necessarily being able to use words); and the period after 1950, when literacy slowly began to be considered as a wider concept and process, including the social and cultural aspects of reading, writing, and functional literacy.

Definition

upright=1.2|thumb|World illiteracy halved between 1970 and 2015.

upright=1.2|thumb|Literate and illiterate world population over time

thumb|right|upright=1.2|Illiteracy rate in France in the 18th and 19th centuries

The range of definitions of literacy used by NGOs, think tanks, and advocacy groups since the 1990s suggests that this shift in understanding from "discrete skill" to "social practice" is both ongoing and uneven. Some definitions remain fairly closely aligned with the traditional "ability to read and write" connotation, whereas others take a broader view:

  • The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (USA) included "quantitative literacy" (numeracy) in its treatment of literacy. It defined literacy as "the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential." It included three types of adult literacy: prose (e.g., a newspaper article), documents (e.g., a bus schedule), and quantitative literacy (e.g., the use of arithmetic operations in a product advertisement).
  • In 2015, the United Nations Statistics Division defined the youth literacy rate as "the percentage of the population aged 15–24 years who can both read and write with understanding a short simple statement on everyday life."
  • In 2016, the European Literacy Policy Network defined literacy as "the ability to read and write [...] in all media (print or electronic), including digital literacy."
  • In 2018, UNESCO included "printed and written materials" and "varying contexts" in its definition of literacy, i.e., "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts."
  • In 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) adult skills surveys, included "written texts" in its definition of literacy, i.e., "the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts in order to participate in society, achieve one's goals, and develop one's knowledge and potential." Also, it treats numeracy and problem solving using technology as separate considerations.
  • In 2021, Education Scotland and the National Literacy Trust in the UK included oral communication skills (listening and speaking) under the umbrella of literacy.
  • As of 2021, the International Literacy Association uses "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, compute, and communicate using visual, audible, and digital materials across disciplines and in any context."
  • The expression "reading literacy" is used by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which has monitored international trends in reading achievement at the fourth grade level since 2001.
  • Other organizations might include numeracy skills and technology skills separately but alongside literacy skills; still others emphasize the increasing involvement of computers and other digital technologies in communication that necessitates additional skills (e.g., interfacing with web browsers and word processing programs, organizing and altering the configuration of files, etc.).
  • Some researchers define literacy as "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In this view, humans in literate societies have sets of practices for producing and consuming writing, and they also have beliefs about these practices. Reading, in this view, is always reading something for some purpose; writing is always writing something for someone for some purpose. Beliefs about reading and writing and their value for society and for the individual always influence the ways literacy is taught, learned, and practiced.

The concept of multiliteracies has gained currency, particularly in English Language Arts curricula, on the grounds that reading "is interactive and informative, and occurs in ever-increasingly technological settings where information is part of spatial, audio, and visual patterns (Rhodes & Robnolt, 2009)". Objections have been raised that this concept downplays the importance of reading instruction that focuses on "alphabetic representations". However, these are not mutually exclusive, as children can become proficient in word-reading while engaging with multiliteracies.

Word reading is fundamental for multiple forms of communication.

  • Disaster literacy – Proposed model for the ability to understand and use life-saving information, including the ability to respond and recover from disasters effectively
  • Linguistic literacy – Ability to read, write, understand, and speak any type of language
  • Mathematical literacy, also called

Classicist Eric Havelock developed a continuum for a culture's literacy, from pre-literate, through craft-literate, recitation-literate and script-literate to type-literate.

Functional illiteracy

Functional illiteracy relates to adults and has been defined in different ways:

  • Inability to use reading, writing, and calculation skills for their own and their community's development.
  • Inability to read well enough to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level.
  • Inability to understand complex texts despite adequate schooling, language skills, elementary reading skills, age, and IQ.

Functional illiteracy is distinguished from primary illiteracy (i.e., the inability to read and write a short, simple statement concerning one's own everyday life) and learning difficulties (e.g., dyslexia). These categories have been contested—as has the concept of "illiteracy" itself—for being predicated on narrow assumptions, primarily derived from school-based contexts, about what counts as reading and writing (e.g., comprehending and following instructions).

Historical overview

Origins

Script is thought to have developed independently at least five times in human history: in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus civilization, lowland Mesoamerica, and China.

thumb|upright=1.2|Bill of sale of a male slave and a building in [[Shuruppak, Sumerian tablet, ]]

Between 3500 BCE and 3000 BCE, in southern Mesopotamia, the ancient Sumerians invented writing. During this era, literacy was "a largely functional matter, propelled by the need to manage the new quantities of information and the new type of governance created by trade and large scale production". Early writing systems first emerged as a recording system in which people used tokens with impressed markings to manage trade and agricultural production. The token system served as a precursor to early cuneiform writing once people began recording information on clay tablets. Proto-Cuneiform texts exhibit not only numerical signs but also ideograms depicting objects being counted. Nonetheless, professional scribes became central to law, finances, accounting, government, administration, medicine, magic, divination, literature, and prayers.

Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged between 3300 BCE and 3100 BCE; the iconography emphasized power among royals and other elites. The Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system was the first notation system to have phonetic values; these symbols are called phonograms.

Writing in lowland Mesoamerica was first used by the Olmec and Zapotec civilizations in 900–400 BCE. These civilizations used glyphic writing and bar-and-dot numerical notation systems for purposes related to royal iconography and calendar systems.

The earliest written notations in China date back to the Shang dynasty in 1200 BCE. These systematic notations, inscribed on bones, recorded sacrifices made, tributes received, and animals hunted, which were activities of the elite. These oracle-bone inscriptions were the early ancestors of modern Chinese script and contained logosyllabic script and numerals. By the time of the consolidation of the Chinese Empire during the Qin and Han dynasties (), written documents were central to the formation and policing of a hierarchical bureaucratic governance structure reinforced through law. Within this legal order, written records kept track of and controlled citizen movements, created records of misdeeds, and documented the actions and judgments of government officials.

Indus script is largely pictorial and has not yet been deciphered; as such, it is unknown whether it includes abstract signs. It is thought that they wrote from right to left and that the script is logographic. Because it has not been deciphered, linguists disagree on whether it is a complete and independent writing system; however, it is generally thought to be an independent writing system that emerged in the Harappa culture.

Existing evidence suggests that most early acts of literacy were, in some areas (such as Egypt), closely tied to power and chiefly used for management practices, and probably less than 1% of the population was literate, as it was confined to a very small group. Scholarship by others, such as Dominique Charpin and a project from the European Union, however, suggest that this was not the case in all ancient societies: both Charpin and the EU's emerging scholarship suggest that writing and literacy were far more widespread in Mesopotamia than scholars previously thought.

Alphabetic writing

According to social anthropologist Jack Goody, there are two interpretations regarding the origin of the alphabet. Many classical scholars, such as historian Ignace Gelb, credit the Ancient Greeks for creating the first alphabetic system () that used distinctive signs for consonants and vowels. Goody contests:

Many scholars argue that the ancient Semitic-speaking peoples of northern Canaan invented the consonantal alphabet as early as 1500 BCE. Much of this theory's development is credited to English archeologist Flinders Petrie, who, in 1905, came across a series of Canaanite inscriptions in the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem. Ten years later, English Egyptologist Alan Gardiner reasoned that these letters contain an alphabet as well as references to the Canaanite goddess Asherah. In 1948, William F. Albright deciphered the text using new evidence, including a series of inscriptions from Ugarit. Discovered in 1929 by French archaeologist Claude F. A. Schaeffer, some of these inscriptions were mythological texts (written in an early Canaanite dialect) that consisted of a 30-letter cuneiform consonantal alphabet.

Another significant discovery was made in 1953 when three arrowheads were uncovered, each containing identical Canaanite inscriptions from 12th century BCE. According to Frank Moore Cross, these inscriptions consisted of alphabetic signs that originated during the transitional development from pictographic script to a linear alphabet. Moreover, he asserts, "These inscriptions also provided clues to extend the decipherment of earlier and later alphabetic texts".

The Canaanite script's consonantal system inspired alphabetical developments in later systems. During the Late Bronze Age, successor alphabets appeared throughout the Mediterranean region and were used in Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

When the Israelites migrated to Canaan between 1200 and 1000 BCE, they adopted a variation of the Canaanite alphabet. Baruch ben Neriah, Jeremiah's scribe, used this alphabet to create the later scripts of the Old Testament. The early Hebrew alphabet was prominent in the Mediterranean region until Neo-Babylonian rulers exiled the Jews to Babylon in the 6th century BCE. It was then that the new script (Square Hebrew) emerged, and the older one rapidly died out.

The Aramaic language declined with the spread of Islam, which was accompanied by the spread of Arabic.

Antiquity

The idea that the majority of people were illiterate in the classical world has been challenged. Anthony DiRenzo asserts that Roman society was "a civilization based on the book and the register" and that "no one, either free or slave, could afford to be illiterate". Similarly, Dupont points out, "The written word was all around them, in both public and private life: laws, calendars, regulations at shrines, and funeral epitaphs were engraved in stone or bronze. The Republic amassed huge archives of reports on every aspect of public life." The imperial civilian administration produced masses of documentation used in judicial, fiscal, and administrative matters, as did the municipalities. The army kept extensive records relating to supply and duty rosters and submitted reports. Merchants, shippers, and landowners (and their personal staffs), especially of the larger enterprises, must have been literate.

In the late fourth century, the Desert Father Pachomius would expect the literacy of a candidate for admission to his monasteries:

<blockquote>They shall give him twenty Psalms or two of the Apostles' epistles or some other part of Scripture. And if he is illiterate he shall go at the first, third and sixth hours to someone who can teach and has been appointed for him. He shall stand before him and learn very studiously and with all gratitude. The fundamentals of a syllable, the verbs and nouns shall all be written for him and even if he does not want to he shall be compelled to read.</blockquote>

During the 4th and 5th centuries, the Church made efforts to ensure a better clergy, especially the bishops, who were expected to have a classical education—the hallmark of a socially acceptable person in higher society. Even after the remnants of the Western Roman Empire fell in the 470s, literacy continued to be a distinguishing mark of the elite, as communication skills were still important in political and church life (bishops were largely drawn from the senatorial class) in a new cultural synthesis that made "Christianity the Roman religion". However, these skills were less needed in the absence of a large imperial administrative apparatus whose middle and top echelons were dominated by the elite. Even so, in pre-modern times, it is unlikely that literacy was found in more than about 30–40% of the population. During the Dark Ages, the highest percentage of literacy was found among the clergy and monks, as they made up much of the staff needed to administer the states of western Europe.

An abundance of graffiti written in the Nabataean script dating back to the beginning of the first millennium CE has been taken to imply a relatively high degree of literacy among the general population in the ancient Arabic-speaking world.

Medieval and early modern eras

The rates and forms of literacy in the European Medieval period vary and are controversial: historian Elaine Treharne writes of "a complex era of strategic literacy, generic fluidity, and linguistic competencies beyond our own experiences." Historian Malcolm Parkes contrasts the different expertise of the professionally literate class, cultivated readers, and pragmatic readers. Historian Mark Hailwood suggests another two type of near-literacy in Early Modern England, of "abcederian literates" who could spell out words to read, and of people who knew the letters though not words, were particularly common in Southern English rural areas: 50% of husbandmen could either sign their name or provide an initial.

Post-Antiquity illiteracy was made worse by the lack of a suitable writing medium, as when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the import of papyrus to Europe ceased. Since papyrus perishes easily and does not last well in the wetter European climate, parchment was used, which was expensive and accessible only by the church and the wealthy. Paper was introduced into Europe via Spain in the 11th century and spread north slowly over the next four centuries. Literacy saw a resurgence as a result, and by the 15th century, paper was widespread.

Estimates of literacy rates vary by time, class, location, sex and reliability: "Unfortunately, there is no statistical information that allows generalizations to be made in terms of numerical proportions or percentages, either for rates of literacy among the medieval population or for annual book production."

{| class="wikitable"

|+ European adult literacy

|-

! Nation !! 1500 (%) !! 1800 (%)

|-

| England || 6 || 53

|-

| Netherlands || 10|| 68

|-

| Belgium || 10||49

|-

| Germany || 6 || 35

|-

| France || 7 || 37

|-

| Austria/Hungary || 6 || 21

|-

| Poland || 6 || 21

|-

| Italy || 9 || 22

|-

| Spain || 9 || 20

|}

However:

  • In the late 1200s, there were 1,500 notaries in Milan, over 1% of the population, for drawing up contracts.
  • "By 1300, 'everyone knew someone who could read', and there were books in every church and every village."
  • By 1500, in England, "probably more than half the population could read, though not necessarily also write." This contrasts with Stevens' estimates of male literacy of 10% by the start of the century (with almost no female literacy)), 20% by the end, and 45% by the end of the 1600s.
  • In Venice in 1587, 33% of men were estimated as literate. Other countries implemented similar measures at this time. These included Denmark in 1739, Poland in 1783, and France in 1794/5.

In Edo-period Japan, literacy in the three major cities has been estimated at 70% for men, 40% for females, but 10-20% lower in the countryside.

Industrialization

In the 19th century, reading would become even more common in the United Kingdom. Public notes, broadsides, handbills, catchpennies and printed songs would have been usual street literature before newspapers became common. Other forms of popular reading material included advertising for events, theaters, and goods for sale. In the late 19th century, gas and electric lighting were becoming more common in private homes, replacing candlelight and oil lamps, enabling reading after dark and increasing the appeal of literacy.

From the mid-19th century onward, the Second Industrial Revolution saw technological improvements in paper production. The new distribution networks, enabled by improved roads and rail, resulted in an increased capacity to supply printed material. Social and educational changes increased the demand for reading matter, as rising literacy rates, particularly among the middle and working classes, created a new mass market for printed material. Wider schooling helped increase literacy rates, which in turn helped lower the cost of publication. A senior government official told Parliament in 1870: