This chapter provides a brief introduction to grapholinguistics, focusing mainly on its core subdisciplines – graphetics and graphematics (or graphemics). Historically, grapholinguistics can be perceived as a neglected subdiscipline of linguistics, though it also explores the topic of written language in its totality, which is not entirely linguistically oriented. The author specifies that its beginnings, as an organized movement, date back to Germany of the 1970s, but various instances of grapholinguistics emerged at different places (and in different languages). The field now has an established textbook, a special section in the online Dictionaries of Linguistics and Communication Science, and, as of quite recently, a proposal for a unifying general theory. This chapter is centered on graphetics and graphematics in order to expose the crucial linguistic dichotomy – that between form and function. Whereas the primary concern of graphetics is the materiality of writing, graphematics deals mainly with the functions of abstract units. The interplay between these two interrelated grapholinguistic subdisciplines is especially evident in the analysis of allography, which focuses on the variation of both concrete and abstract units (graphs and graphemes, respectively).