The term Diglossia, derived from the Greek word, diglōssos(two tongues) was brought into popular usage in the English language by Charles Ferguson who wrote an influential paper of the same name (Ferguson, 1959).

Diglossia is loosely defined as a situation where two varieties of a language exist in a speech community, each with its specific functions.

In fact, diglossia can be extended to include not just varieties of a language, but two separate languages too.

The two linguistic varieties are denoted by “H” and “L”. When this system was introduced in the 1950s, “H” represented “high” and “L” represented “low”. This was to designate the “high” category as the relatively more respected variety, used for official purposes like speeches by political leaders, newspapers, journals etc, while “low” is the variety used within the community and informally between family and friends. Currently, the convention is to simply use H and L without the connotation of one being superior to another (Pym, 2019).

Before progressing any further, mentioning a standard definition of diglossia would be prudent. As defined by Ferguson,

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. (Ferguson, 1959, p. 1)

source is https://alphaomegatranslations.com/foreign-language/the-phenomenon-of-diglossia/

Diglossia in Greece : Tsakonian language

Deconstructing the above definition, the phrase “relatively stable language situation” can be interpreted as stability in terms of the existence of the diglossic situation. For example, some languages like Arabic have existed in a diglossic situation as long as the language has existed while for other languages like Swiss German, diglossia developed as a result of political changes and isolation from the centres of German linguistic standardization (Ferguson, 1959, p. 4).

Looking at stability as a function of whether a language variety stays H or L through the centuries however would not work since a variety of romance languages started as L languages, in a far less superior position compared to the H languages of the time (for example, Latin) and in the present time, these languages are generally in the H position (Pym, 2019).

The definition mentions that the superposed variety(H) is “highly codified”, that is, there is a large body of literature concerning the correct usage of the superposed variety. This is contradicted by Kaye (1972) in his paper “Remarks on diglossia in Arabic: defined vs. ill-defined”. In the case of Arabic, MSA(Modern Standard Arabic) is considered H and the L can be any one of the varieties spoken in the Middle East.

According to Kaye, it is easier for a linguist to define what MSA isn’t rather than defining what it is and the phonology of MSA cannot be described with the same ease as that of the L of Arabic. (Kaye, 1972, p. 2). In my opinion, for a lot of cases, the H form is indeed better described than the L form, an example would be the diglossia between Hindi(H) and Hindustani(L). Most grammar books explain and teach Hindi which has a different vocabulary compared to Hindustani which is spoken informally and has plenty of loan words from Urdu.

The definition also mentions “very divergent”. This can be interpreted in the sense that

the differences between the “canonic” cases of diglossia, i.e, the 4 diglossic situations mentioned in the paper(Swiss German, Haitian Creole, Modern Arabic and Greek) and their H counterparts cannot be explained simply by the environment of the speakers.

The differences go down to orthography, inflectional morphology and phonology. For example, in Cairene, /beet/ (house) corresponds to /baytu/(nominative), /bayta/(accusative) and /bayti/(genitive) which means that categories of case are unrecognized for Cairene. (Kaye, 1972, p. 41)

Ferguson’s initial paper on diglossia focussed on a single language being characterized by the diglossic situation while some later interpretations have expanded the definition of diglossia to include situations in a speech community where two different languages are used in the H and L functions. (Gumperz, 1971)(Hawkins, 1983, p. 14).

Such a situation is observed in Paraguay where almost everyone can speak both Spanish and Guarani, Spanish being the H and Guarani being the L. Hence, diglossia is not primarily a monolingual situation but can exist in bilingual and multilingual situations (Fishman, 1967).

Arguments have been made against the stance of expanding the definition of diglossia to include multidialectal situations.

Multidialectal/Multilingual contexts include the diglossic situation between Haitian Creole and French in Haiti. “True” diglossic situations like the one in Greek or Arabic are different from multilingual situations in the sense that the L for both these languages is natively spoken and it varies from place to place. Descriptive grammar can be written for the L variety.

The H variety in this scenario is obtained by “purification” rules. In the multilingual situation, the direct opposite is done, where the H exists as a natively spoken, independent variety and the L is derived from the standard H. The former is the bottom-up approach while the latter is the top-down approach.

The stance, in this argument, is that the definition of diglossia should be narrowed, instead of expanded to fit creole-like/multi-dialectal situations (Hawkins, 1983, p. 1)

Further, diglossia in each speech community can be characterized by the eight features mentioned in Ferguson(1959). The features as detailed by Ferguson are described below along with the contradictions and commentary by various authors over the decades that have passed.

Features of Diglossia

Function

According to Ferguson, each variety in the diglossic situation has a specific scenario in which it might be used.

Using L in a public speech would be inappropriate, similar to using H in informal situations.

An extension to this definition (especially for diglossic situations where the diglossia is between two different languages) would be that a language that occupies the L position may also be H at the same time in a different setting.

An example would be the situation in Catalonia where a few decades ago, Catalan would be the L language and Spanish the H language. Due to the standardization of Catalan and the push towards making it more dominant, it has assumed the position of the H language, especially in Barcelona. For the immigrant groups, Spanish can be the L language and again at the same time, for the rural folk, a different variation of Catalan is the L variety (Pym, 2019).

Prestige

H is associated with higher prestige and L is considered to be the language of the “uneducated” and the “illiterate”.

H is considered to be beautiful, perfect and the standard to aspire to. In certain cases, the superiority of H over L is due to religious reasons, examples would be the case of Greek and of Arabic.

Ferguson suggests that the feeling of H being superior compared to L is so strong that L is reported to “not exist” and this is not due to the speakers of the language deliberately trying to mislead the authors. Frequently, with regards to the diglossic situation in Arabic, a fluent speaker of L who does not know H will be reported as someone who does not have knowledge of Arabic.

Literary Heritage

There is a sizable amount of literature written in H, that is, H is highly codified and regularly the literature in H is considered to be more prestigious. But, literary works are not necessarily confined to H but can be a combination of both H and L or could be just L too.

In Greek, an example of a purely H text would be P. KaUigha’s ‘Thanos Vlekas’(1855), purely L text is ‘Plusii ke Ftochi’ by G. Xenopoulos(1907) and a mixture of the two is A. Papadiamantis, ‘Stringla Manna’ (1905) (Hawkins, 1983, p. 5).

Acquisition

The knowledge of L is acquired at home, with friends and family while H is learnt in school. In the Arab world, this is especially a problem since the language spoken at home(usually Cairene) differs from the one taught in school which is MSA (SAIEGH–HADDAD, E., 2003).

Standardization

Ferguson states that H is more codified and there are grammars, dictionaries and so on that exist for H while for L, the documentation is conducted by scholars outside the community. This view is challenged by Kaye(1972) who presents two models of diglossia, the process model and the static model.

The process model considers L as the standard and derives H from it using a series of “purification” rules while the static model considers the H and L as two “poles of reference”.

They argue that in Arabic, it is the various L’s that are stable while the H is “ill-defined”. How an individual uses H depends on their social background or their level of education. Hence, Kaye sides with the process model of diglossia that they theorized while also elaborating on the positives of the static model in their paper.

Stability

As mentioned above while discussing the definition, diglossic situations can arise and exist alongside the language and this has been the case for Arabic while Haitian Creole arose from the creolization of pidgin French. Greek diglossia has existed for centuries but it achieved its present form only in the nineteenth century (Ferguson, 1959, p. 4).

Grammar

A common consensus in the writings on diglossia seems to be that the grammatical structures of the H and L variety are quite different. MSA nouns have three cases, most colloquial dialects have none. Cairene, a colloquial dialect, is simpler than MSA. There is a syntactic difference as well between the two, where Cairene uses “of” and MSA does not consider such a particle or syntactic construction. Haitian Creole, one of the defining languages in Ferguson(1959) does not use the gender or number in the noun while French, the H counterpart of Haitian Creole uses it (Ferguson, 1959, p. 10). Another unanimous opinion is that typically, L has a “simpler” grammar compared to H.

Lexicon

H and L generally share quite a lot of words. Words that exist in H might not exist in L because topics that are raised while speaking H would by and large not be spoken in L. A curious situation that is pointed out in Ferguson(1959) is that certain terms have words in both H and L and using either word immediately indicates if a person is speaking in H or L.

From personal experience, the word for “book” in Hindustani(L) is kitaab which is presumably a loan word from Urdu, while in Hindi(H) the word is pustak, which is a word derived from Sanskrit. Similarly, in Katharevousa, the H form of Greek, the word for wine is ínos and in L it is krasí.

Often Diglossia and bilingualism are interconnected such that diglossia can exist with bilingualism and without it too. A case of both diglossia and bilingualism would be in Paraguay as mentioned above where almost the entire country speaks in Spanish(H) and Guarani(L). According to Fishman(1967), most examples of such a situation where both diglossia and bilingualism exist are because the community has available to them “compartmentalized roles” (Fishman, 1967, p. 5).

Conclusion

Diglossia is a vast topic and one blanket definition will not be enough to cover all cases of this situation. Often there is an overlap between diglossia and bilingualism but a clear distinction can be drawn here since bilingualism is on an individual level and diglossia is a social situation: it affects societies (Pym, 2019).

Despite various authors postulating their own definitions of diglossia based on the different linguistic situations, it is difficult to find a comprehensive definition of diglossia that applies to all languages. In my opinion, the definition of diglossia should be specific to speech communities/languages. A loose definition of diglossia may be presented here.

Diglossia is a social situation where two language varieties are used under different conditions by a speech community.

This definition covers the basic requirement that a diglossic situation comes under.

References

  • Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. word, 15(2), 325-340
  • Pym, Anthony, “Diglossia” (2019). Open Educational Resources Collection. 16

  • Language in social groups JJ Gumperz - 1971 - Stanford University Press Stanford

  • Hawkins, P. (1983). Diglossia revisited. Language Sciences, 5(1), 1–20.
  • Kaye, A. S. (1972). Remarks on diglossia in Arabic: well-defined vs. ill-defined.
  • SAIEGH–HADDAD, E. L. I. N. O. R. (2003). Linguistic distance and initial reading acquisition: The case of Arabic diglossia. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24(3), 431-451.

  • Fishman, J. A. (1986). Introduction to sociolinguistics, I: The sociolinguistics of society By Ralph Fasold. Language, 62(1), 188-189.

  • Fishman, J. A. (1967). Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia with and without bilingualism. Journal of social issues, 23(2), 29-38.