To teach young people how to read and write and use mathematical signs, the world’s first formal schools were organized in Sumer shortly after the invention of writing and a math notation. Schools naturally led to teachers who prepared lessons in the forms of lists and thus were born the world’s first scholars. Scholars led to scholarship and an explosion of knowledge and to still another kind of information overload. Science, which is basically organized knowledge, emerged approximately around 2000 BC to deal with the information overload created by teachers and scholars. Science in turn gave rise to its own unique information overload, which led to computing at first in the form of punched cards manipulated by mechanical machines, used for the first time for the 1870 US census by a company that later became known as International Business Machines. The mechanical computers eventually evolved into electronic computers beginning in 1945 with the Illiac and the Eniac. The overload from computer use in turn quickly led to the Internet, which represents a marriage of computing with telephony. This process of one form of language giving rise to a new form of language as information overloads developed led to the evolutionary chain of six languages (Logan 2000a), namely :
1. Speech,
2. Writing,
3. Mathematics,
4. Science,
5. Computing, and
6. the Internet.
The justification for regarding each of these six forms of verbal language as distinct languages is that each has its own unique semantics or lexicon and each has its own unique syntax or grammar, which linguists such as Paivio and Begg regard as the criteria for identifying a system of communication as a distinct language. “Semantics and syntax (meaning and grammatical patterning) are the indispensable core attributes of any language” (25)

The Six Literacies
The vocabulary and grammar of spoken and written language are similar, but there are subtle differences. The vocabulary of math and science are completely different from each other and from spoken and written language. The vocabulary and grammar of computing and the Internet are also quite distinct from the other forms of language with elements in the case of computing such as word processing, databases, and spread sheets, and in the case of the Internet, such as Web pages, hypertext, and search engines. Another reason the six forms of language may be considered as distinct languages is that each helps us to think or conceptualize differently. It is for this reason that it is important to acquire all six forms of literacy, namely: 1. orality or rhetoric; 2. literacy; 3. numeracy; 4. science literacy; 5. computer literacy; and 6. Internet literacy.