Diglossia

This article is about languages. For writing systems, see Digraphia. For the bird Diglossa, see Flowerpiercer.
The station board of Hapur Junction railway station in North India demonstrating digraphia of two formal registers, Hindi and Urdu, of a common vernacular, Hindustani,[1][2] an example of triglossia.[3]
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In linguistics, diglossia (/daɪˈɡlɒsiə/ dy-GLOSS-ee-ə, US also /daɪˈɡlɔːsiə/ dy-GLAW-see-ə) is where two dialects or languages are used (in fairly strict compartmentalization) by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety (labeled "L" or "low" variety), a second, highly codified lect (labeled "H" or "high") is used in certain situations such as literature, formal education, or other specific settings, but not used normally for ordinary conversation.[4] The H variety may have no 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 medieval Europe, where Latin (H) remained in formal use even as colloquial speech (L) diverged), an unrelated language, or a distinct yet closely related present-day dialect (as in northern India and Pakistan, where Hindustani (L) is used alongside the standard registers of Hindi (H) and Urdu (H); Hochdeutsch (H) is used alongside German dialects (L); the Arab world, where Modern Standard Arabic (H) is used alongside other varieties of Arabic (L); and China, where Standard Chinese (H) is used as the official, literary standard and local varieties of Chinese (L) are used in everyday communication).[3][5] Other examples include literary Katharevousa (H) versus spoken Demotic Greek (L); literary Tamil (H) versus colloquial spoken Tamil (L); Indonesian, with its bahasa baku (H) and bahasa gaul (L) forms;[6] Standard American English (H) versus African-American Vernacular English or Hawaiian Pidgin (L);[7] and literary (H) versus spoken (L) Welsh.

  1. ^ Kachru, Braj B.; Kachru, Yamuna; Sridhar, S. N. (2008). Language in South Asia. Cambridge University Press. p. 316. 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. ^ Cameron, Deborah; Panović, Ivan (2014). Working with Written Discourse. Sage Publishing. p. 52. 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. ^ a b Goswami, Krishan Kumar (1994). Code Switching in Lahanda Speech Community: A Sociolinguistic Survey. Kalinga Publications. p. 14. 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. ^ Ferguson, Charles (1959). "Diglossia". Word. 15 (2): 325–340. doi:10.1080/00437956.1959.11659702. 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. ^ Sneddon, James N. (2003). "Diglossia in Indonesian". Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. 159 (4): 519–549. doi:10.1163/22134379-90003741.
  7. ^ Judkins, Cara (2020-05-28). "AAVE: The "Other" American English Variety". Wikitongues. Retrieved 2022-03-26.