Diglossia

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about languages. For writing systems, see Digraphia.
Not to be confused with
Diglossa (bird)
.
Northern India. Digraphia is present between the two formal registers of a common vernacular, Hindustani,[1][2] which is an example of triglossia.[3]
Sociolinguistics
Key concepts
Areas of study
People
Sociolinguists
Related fields

In

native speakers within the community. In cases of three dialects, the term triglossia is used. When referring to two writing systems coexisting for a single language, the term digraphia
is used.

The high variety may be an older stage of the same language (as in

Hawaiian pidgin (L);[7] and literary (H) versus spoken (L) Welsh
.

Etymology

The

bilingualism; it was given its specialized meaning "two forms of the same language" by Emmanuel Rhoides in the prologue of his Parerga in 1885. The term was quickly adapted into French as diglossie by the Greek linguist and demoticist Ioannis Psycharis, with credit to Rhoides.[8]

The

sociolinguist Charles A. Ferguson introduced the English equivalent diglossia in 1959 in the title of an article. His conceptualization of diglossia describes a society with more than one prevalent language or the high variety, which pertains to the language used in literature, newspapers, and other social institutions.[9] The article has been cited over 4,000 times.[10] The term is particularly embraced among sociolinguists and a number of these proposed different interpretations or varieties of the concept.[11]

Language registers and types of diglossia

In his 1959 article, Charles A. Ferguson defines diglossia as follows:

DIGLOSSIA is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation.[4]

Here, diglossia is seen as a kind of

bilingualism
in a society in which one of the languages has high prestige (henceforth referred to as "H"), and another of the languages has low prestige ("L"). In Ferguson's definition, the high and low variants are always closely related.

Ferguson gives the example of standardized Arabic and says that, "very often, educated Arabs will maintain they never use L at all, in spite of the fact that direct observation shows that they use it constantly in ordinary conversation" [4]

Alsatian language (Elsässisch) serves as (L) and French as (H). Heinz Kloss calls the (H) variant exoglossia and the (L) variant endoglossia.[13]

In some cases (especially with

Jamaican Creole as (L) and Standard English as (H) in Jamaica. Similar is the case in the Scottish Lowlands, with Scots as (L) and Scottish English
as (H).

(H) is usually the written language whereas (L) is the spoken language. In formal situations, (H) is used; in informal situations, (L) is used. Sometimes, (H) is used in informal situations and as spoken language when speakers of 2 different (L) languages and dialects or more communicate with each other (as a lingua franca), but not the other way around.

One of the earliest examples was that of

Late Egyptian, which itself later evolved into Demotic
(700 BC – AD 400). These two later forms served as (L) languages in their respective periods. But in both cases, Middle Egyptian remained the standard written, prestigious form, the (H) language, and was still used for this purpose until the fourth century AD, more than sixteen centuries after it had ceased to exist in everyday speech.

Another historical example is Latin, Classical Latin being the (H) and Vulgar Latin the (L); the latter, which is almost completely unattested in text, is the tongue from which the Romance languages descended.

The (L) variants are not just simplifications or "corruptions" of the (H) variants. In phonology, for example, (L) dialects are as likely to have phonemes absent from the (H) as vice versa. Some Swiss German dialects have three phonemes, /e/, /ɛ/ and /æ/, in the phonetic space where Standard German has only two phonemes, /ɛ(ː)/ (Berlin 'Berlin', Bären 'bears') and /eː/ (Beeren 'berries'). Jamaican Creole has fewer vowel phonemes than standard English, but it has additional palatal /kʲ/ and /ɡʲ/ phonemes.

Especially in endoglossia the (L) form may also be called "

mesolect
".

Ferguson's classic examples include Standard German/Swiss German,

Greek military regime in 1974, Dimotiki was made into Greece's sole standard language in 1976, and nowadays, Katharevousa is (with a few exceptions) no longer used. Harold Schiffman wrote about Swiss German in 2010, "It seems to be the case that Swiss German was once consensually agreed to be in a diglossic hierarchy with Standard German, but that this consensus is now breaking."[14] Code-switching is also commonplace, especially in the Arabic world; according to Andrew Freeman, this is "different from Ferguson's description of diglossia which states that the two forms are in complementary distribution."[15][unreliable source?
] To a certain extent, there is code switching and overlap in all diglossic societies, even German-speaking Switzerland.

Examples where the High/Low dichotomy is justified in terms of social prestige include

Standard Italian as (H) in Italy and German dialects and Standard German in Germany. In Italy and Germany, those speakers who still speak non-standard dialects typically use those dialects in informal situations, especially in the family. In German-speaking Switzerland, on the other hand, Swiss German dialects are to a certain extent even used in schools, and to a larger extent in churches. Ramseier calls German-speaking Switzerland's diglossia a "medial diglossia", whereas Felicity Rash prefers "functional diglossia".[16]
Paradoxically, Swiss German offers both the best example of diglossia (all speakers are native speakers of Swiss German and thus diglossic) and the worst, because there is no clear-cut hierarchy. While Swiss Standard German is spoken in formal situations like in school, news broadcasts, and government speeches, Swiss Standard German is also spoken in informal situations only whenever a German Swiss is communicating with a German-speaking foreigner who it is assumed would not understand the respective dialect. Amongst themselves, the German-speaking Swiss use their respective Swiss German dialect, irrespective of social class, education or topic.

In most African countries, as well as some Asian ones, a European language serves as the official, prestige language, and local languages are used in everyday life outside formal situations. For example,

Timor-Leste
is in a similar situation with Portuguese. Most Asian countries instead have re-established a local prestige language (such as Hindi or Indonesian) and have at least partially phased out the colonial language, commonly English or Russian but also Dutch, French, and Portuguese in a few places, except for international, business, scientific, or interethnic communication; the colonial languages have also usually left many loanwards in the local languages.

Gender-based diglossia

In Ghana, a dialect called "Student Pidgin" was traditionally used by men in all-male secondary schools, though an ever-increasing number of female students are now also using it due to social change.[17]

Gender-based oral speech variations are found in Arabic-speaking communities. Makkan males are found to adopt more formal linguistic variants in their WhatsApp messages than their female counterparts, who tend to use more informal "locally prestigious" linguistic variants.[18]

Among Garifuna (Karif) speakers in Central America, men and women quite often have different words for the same concepts.[citation needed]

In specific languages

Greek

Further information: Greek language question

Greek diglossia belongs to the category whereby, while the living language of the area evolves and changes as time passes by, there is an artificial retrospection to and imitation of earlier (more ancient) linguistic forms preserved in writing and considered to be scholarly and classic.[19] One of the earliest recorded examples of diglossia was during the first century AD, when Hellenistic Alexandrian scholars decided that, in order to strengthen the link between the people and the glorious culture of the Greek "Golden Age" (5th c. BC), people should adopt the language of that era. The phenomenon, called "Atticism", dominated the writings of part of the Hellenistic period, the Byzantine and Medieval era. Following the Greek War of Independence of 1821 and in order to "cover new and immediate needs" making their appearance with "the creation of the Greek State",[20] scholars brought to life "Κatharevousa" or "purist" language. Katharevousa did not constitute the natural development of the language of the people, the "Koine", "Romeika", Demotic Greek or Dimotiki as it is currently referred to. It constituted an attempt to purify the language from vulgar forms such as words of foreign origin, especially Turkish and Slavic languages, but also French or Italian and replace them with ancient Attic forms and even by reaching down to Homeric cleansed and refined words.[citation needed]

Serbian

Diglossia in modern Serbian language is the most obvious if we consider the usage of past tenses in High and Low varieties.[21][unreliable source] The High variety of the Serbian is based on the Serbo-Croatian language of the former communist Yugoslavia. In the High form (newspapers, television, other mass media, education, and any other formal use or situation) all of the Serbian past tenses are replaced by the present perfect tense (which is in the Serbian school system either called "perfect tense" or the "past tense", but never "present perfect" since WW2).

On the other side, the Low form informal vernacular language contains several other past tenses (aorist, two past perfect forms and rarely imperfect, and one more with no name[clarification needed]), of which the aorist is the most important. In the Low form the present perfect tense with perfective verbs is not strictly treated as a past tense. In many rural and semi-rural parts of Serbia the aorist, despite being banished from any formal use, is the most frequent past tense form in the spoken informal language, more frequent even than the highly prestigious present perfect. When statements of peasants need to be written down by authorities, or published in any form, the past tenses are usually replaced by the present perfect tense.

The High form of Serbian today does have native speakers: those are usually younger and more educated parts of the population living in big cities, such as Belgrade (the capital of Serbia) and Novi Sad. Most of them are unable to differentiate the meanings among the present perfect tense and the other past tenses, which they do not use due to the influence of education and mass media.

Arabic

Main article: Varieties of Arabic

Diglossia may have appeared in Arabic when Muslim cities emerged during the early period of Islam.[22]

Sociolinguistics

As an aspect of study of the relationships between codes and

mutually intelligible
.

Thomas Ricento, an author on language policy and political theory believes that there is always a "socially constructed hierarchy, indexed from low to high."

public speeches
that they might hear on television and radio. The high prestige dialect (or language) tends to be the more formalised, and its forms and vocabulary often 'filter down' into the vernacular though often in a changed form.

In many diglossic areas, there is controversy and

native language
, ought to be abandoned in favor of the high dialect, which presently is nobody's native language.

See also

References

Citations

  1. ISBN 978-0-521-78141-1
    . English, the language of the despised colonial ruler, obviously was made unacceptable, and there emerged a general consensus that the national language of free and independent India would be "Hindustani," meaning Hindi/Urdu, essentially digraphic variants of the same spoken language, cf. C. King (1994) and R. King (2001). Hindi is written in Devanagari script and Urdu in a derivative of the Persian script, itself a derivative of Arabic.
  2. ISBN 978-1-4739-0436-1
    . Hindi and Urdu, two major languages of the Indian subcontinent, have also featured frequently in discussions of digraphia, and have been described as varieties of one language, differentiated above all by the scripts normally used to write them.
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-81-85163-57-4
    . In a Hindi-Urdu speech community, we find Hindi (high), Urdu (high) and Hindustani in triglossia (Goswami 1976, 1978) where Hindi and Urdu are in the state of horizontal diglossia while Hindustani and Hindi-Urdu are in the vertical diglossia.
  4. ^
    S2CID 239352211
    . ...diglossia differs from the more widespread standard-with-dialects in that no segment of the speech community in diglossia regularly uses H as a medium of ordinary conversation, and any attempt to do so is felt to be either pedantic and artificial (Arabic, Greek) or else in some sense disloyal to the community (Swiss German, Creole). In the more usual standard-with-dialects situation the standard is often similar to the variety of a certain region or social group (e.g. Tehran Persian, Calcutta Bengali) which is used in ordinary conversation more or less naturally by members of the group and as a superposed variety by others.
  5. ^ Koul, Omkar Nath (1983). Language in Education. Indian Institute of Languages Studies. p. 43. In urban areas, a speech community in Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu developed as a result of the language contact and mixed glossia. The development of modern standard languages—Hindi and Urdu began in the early nineteenth century.
  6. doi:10.1163/22134379-90003741
    .
  7. ^ Judkins, Cara (2020-05-28). "AAVE: The "Other" American English Variety". Wikitongues. Retrieved 2022-03-26.
  8. doi:10.1075/hl.22.1-2.07fer
    .
  9. ISBN 9789004264410
    .
  10. ^ "Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2019-05-01.
  11. ISBN 978-9067651394
    .
  12. S2CID 144875014
    .
  13. ^ Kloss, Heinz (1968). "Notes concerning a language-nation typology". In Fishman, Joshua A.; Ferguson, Charles A.; Das Gupta, Jyotirindra (eds.). Language Problems of Developing Nations. Wiley. pp. 69–85.
  14. ^ Schiffman, Harold. "Classical and extended diglossia". Retrieved 2010-09-10.
  15. ^ Freeman, Andrew (9 December 1996). "Andrew Freeman's Perspectives on Arabic Diglossia". Andy Freeman's Homepage. Archived from the original on 27 May 2010. Retrieved 8 September 2010.
  16. ISBN 0-8204-3413-2
    .
  17. ^ "Language and gender in African contexts: Towards a research agenda". ResearchGate. Retrieved 2019-05-01.
  18. ^ Azhari, Hanadi (n.d.). Is the Diglossic Situation in Arabic Making Its Way into Texting? A Sociolinguistic Study of Phonological Variation in Makkan Arabic (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-04-27. Retrieved 2019-01-25 – via cla-acl.ca.
  19. ^ Triandaphyllidis, Manolis (1963). Apanta (Άπαντα) (vol.5). Thessaloniki: Aristotle University, Institute for Modern Greek Studies (Manolis Triandaphyllidis Foundation). p. 491.
  20. ^ Σετάτος, Μιχάλης (1969). Ελληνοϊνδικά Μελετήματα. Θεσσαλονίκη: Κωνσταντινίδης. p. 15.
  21. ^ Aco Nevski, 'Past Tenses in Serbian language and modern trends of their use'
  22. ISBN 9780521119368
    .
  23. ^ Ricento, Thomas (2012). "Political economy and English as a 'global' language". Critical Multilingualism Studies. 1 (1): 31–56. Archived from the original on 2017-03-04. Retrieved 2017-03-04.

Sources

  • Steven Roger Fischer, "diglossia—A History of Writing"[1][
    ISBN 978-1-86189-167-9
  • Ursula Reutner, "Vers une typologie pluridimensionnelle des francophonies", in: Ursula Reutner, Manuel des francophonies, Berlin/Boston, de Gruyter 2017, 9–64.

Further reading

External links

Look up diglossia in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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