Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Having no written language; preliterate.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective not using a writing system; -- of societies, cultures, or tribes.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Not
literate ;illiterate - noun A nonliterate person.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective used of a society that has not developed writing
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word nonliterate.
Examples
-
People from poor, oppressed, traditionally nonliterate Asian communities perform similarly to people from poor, oppressed, traditionally nonliterate African communities.
-
Her previous work in nonliterate communities had shown her that children who go to school regularly seem to acquire, without even realizing it, specific techniques that might help them do well on the kinds of memory tasks used in IQ tests.
Red Flags or Red Herrings? Susan Engel 2011
-
Her previous work in nonliterate communities had shown her that children who go to school regularly seem to acquire, without even realizing it, specific techniques that might help them do well on the kinds of memory tasks used in IQ tests.
Red Flags or Red Herrings? Susan Engel 2011
-
The successfully Americanized mother stereotype posed as sure a threat to her children as did the nonliterate immigrant.
-
One answer may be an increasingly "nonliterate culture," as historian Diane Ravitch of New York University puts it.
-
On the other hand, the landdag and its symbols served in the place of writs and contracts, so that the actions of the nonliterate elders could be ordered and coordinated by the governor and the Council.
-
Literacy and Christianity, for example, have given even nonliterate, non-churchgoing women new vocabulary and symbols for conceptualizing, and sometimes contesting, local practices and meanings related to traditional feminine qualities, duties, and roles.
Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005
-
For the most part, these indigenous maps are not artifactual ones, at least not in the sense that Western-trained researchers are likely to recognize (e.g., lines and symbols on paper); in this largely nonliterate agrarian society, such forms of cartography have not generally been necessary, even to the ruling elites of precolonial polities.
Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005
-
Initially, historians tended to use oral history as a way to fill in facts and evidence, particularly in nonliterate societies, where there was no written record, or, within literate societies, in groups that had tended to be excluded from the written record; they tended to use oral history as
'I Saw a Nightmare …' Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 2005
-
On the day she finally decided to tell me about her own tattoos, Rosalina Malungana, the Swiss Mission-educated woman who, as we saw in chapter 3, reminisced so romantically about her common-law marriage to a Portuguese truck driver, acknowledged one source of conflict in their relationship that stemmed from Rosalina's desire to befriend her new non-Christian and nonliterate neighbors in Chibuto:
Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005
Comments
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.