As Weth & Juffermans set out in their introduction, the critical approach to writing adopted in this volume sees each chapter interpret the ‘tyranny of writing’ in its own way, albeit with a focus on prescriptive norms, power, and social inequality. Florian Coulmas expands on the ‘tyranny of writing’, re-evaluating Saussure's argument that writing should be excluded from the study of language. Although Joop van der Horst takes a broad perspective spanning both time and geography in arguing that the European standard language culture in place since the Renaissance is now coming to an end, the other chapters look at instances of writing tyranny in more specific contexts.

In the first of these, Daniel argues that the vernacular orthography used for writing birch-bark letters in Medieval Novgorod not only functioned as an in-group orthography that was actively taught and achieved a degree of local prestige, but also represented a counter-norm resisting the tyranny of the standard. Manuela Böhm and Ulrich Mehlem focus on late-nineteenth-century educational settings in France and Germany, respectively; whereas in France writing was used as a vehicle for the imposition of French as national language, the German educational reform movement attacked writing as the basis for education, yet in both cases language ideologies motivated by nationalist or centrist political ideologies led to the suppression of peripheral linguistic minorities (Breton and Polish, respectively).

Ashraf Abdelhay, Busi Makoni, & Sinfree Makoni look at the Rejaf Language Conference of 1928, where ‘native voices’ were erased as colonisers pronounced on issues of differentiation between—and the selection of an orthography for—supposedly distinct local varieties. Still in the African context but in the modern day, Friederike Lupke argues that in West Africa a standard language culture, modelled on the European ideal of monolingualism, should be abandoned in favour of a language-independent writing system better suited to the highly multilingual patterns of language use on the ground. The postcolonial thread is also picked up by Harshana Rambukwella, whose analysis of reactions to the language used by two cricketers from different social backgrounds points to the reproduction of class distinctions (based on the written standard) in Sri Lanka as during British rule.

David C. S. Li highlights the challenges of writing Standard Chinese for Hongkongers of South Asian heritage, who experience even greater difficulties than their Cantonese-L1 peers, particularly if they come from modest socioeconomic backgrounds. Also addressing the tyranny of written Chinese in a regional context, Xuan Wang adopts a linguistic landscape approach to the writing of marginalised local varieties in a tourist hotspot in Central China, before the final two chapters deal with the writing of regional language online. Jos Swanenberg's analysis of a black comedian's tweets shows how he rebels against traditional ways of writing Brabantish, a regional language of the Netherlands, while Lucas Duane looks at the link between politics on the Balearic Islands and attitudes towards the local (‘salty’) form of the definite article and the Catalan standard.