This volume grew out of the workshop Writing Language, held at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen. The papers represent several lines of research into the intricate relation between writing and spoken language: Theoretical and computational linguists discuss the models that explain why orthographies are the way they are and the constraints that hold between writing and speaking a language; researchers in special education deal with the question of how certain aspects of orthography can be learned; and psycholinguists discuss aspects of language processing affected by variation in orthographies.