List of diglossic regions
Encyclopedia
Diglossia
refers to the use by a language community of two languages or dialects, a "high" or "H" variety restricted to certain formal situations, and a "low" or "L" variety for everyday interaction. This page contains a list of nations, cultures, or other communities which sources describe as featuring a diglossic language situation.
is considered H while AAVE is considered L. Its pronunciation
is, in some respects, common to Southern American English
, which is spoken by many African Americans and many non-African Americans in the United States. Several creolists, including William Stewart, John Dillard, and John Rickford, argue that AAVE shares so many characteristics with creole
dialects spoken by black people in much of the world that AAVE itself is a creole, while others maintain that there are no significant parallels. Many traditional middle-class and upper-class African Americans are more comfortable with American Standard English.
, standard Arabic is H and local "colloquial" Arabic is L.
The situation with the Literary Arabic
(الفصحى al-fuṣ-ḥā) vs spoken varieties of Arabic
(العامية al-`āmmiyya or الدارجة ad-dārija) differs from country to country but every Arab country's official language is "standard Arabic". There is no consensus on which version of Arabic should be taught to foreigners.
The debate continues about the future of the Arabic language, both among Arabic linguists in the Arab world and outside it. Some prefer the status quo (existing diglossia). The other suggestions are:
Both ideas (the Hebrew (1) or the Greek (2) language reforms) have become feasible with the globalization and the increase of the internet and mass-media usage among Arabs but there must be consensus between governments, scholars and the population and the efforts to follow. The Al-Jazeera television and others did a lot to promote standard Arabic among Arabs.
Ibrahim Kayid Mahmoud, College of Education, King Faisal University, Al-Hassa – Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on Literary Arabic between Diglossia and Bilingualism (excerpt):
As mentioned above, the new Western term "Formal Spoken Arabic" (other terms include: "Educated Spoken Arabic", "Inter-Arabic", "Middle Arabic" and "Spoken MSA") is to describe the modern variety of Arabic spoken by educated Arabs, a mix between standard Arabic (acrolect) and vernacular Arabic (basilect). It is more common in Eastern Arabs states (Levante and the Gulf
) but sometimes used to described high-level Egyptian or Maghrebi Arabic. This new term represents a spoken language shared by Arabs from different regions when they have to communicate to each other. The pronunciation may reveal the speaker's origin but nevertheless, this simplified version of Arabic is becoming popular with foreign students who wish to be able communicate with a wide-range of Arabic speakers. As the base for the training, the Levantine Arabic
is often chosen, as the one considered by many as the closest to literary Arabic but teachers and students change according to the knowledge and interest. In Western Arab countries and Egypt the pure colloquial forms of Arabic are more dominant and, generally, knowledge and usage of standard Arabic is limited. Some speakers can easily maintain a conversation in standard Arabic, some prefer to switch to their vernacular dialect even in the formal situations.
Formal Spoken Arabic has been created through the impact of the Arab satellite channels, which are increasingly shaping the region's sociopolitical views, while also affecting the Arabic language itself.
exhibits diglossia in both written and spoken forms of the language's uppermost registers. Shadhubhasha (সাধু shadhu = 'chaste' or 'sage'; ভাষা bhasha = 'language') exhibited longer verb inflections and heavily Sanskritized vocabulary. Up to the turn of the 19th century, most Bengali literature took this form. Cholitbhasha(চলতিভাষা ) or Cholitobhasha (চলিত cholito = 'current' or 'running'), based on the formal registers of spoken, educated dialects, has much simpler grammatical forms, and has become the modern literary standard.
, Standard Malay
(Bahasa Melayu) is promoted as the national language and is the H variety, while Brunei Malay is used very widely throughout society and it constitutes the L variety. One major difference between these dialects of Malay is that Brunei Malay tends to have the verb at the front, while Standard Malay generally places it after the subject. It has been estimated that 84% of core vocabulary in Brunei Malay and Standard Malay is cognate, though their pronunciation often differs very considerably. While Standard Malay has six vowels, Brunei Malay has only three: /a, i, u/.
One complicating factor is that English is also widely used in Brunei, especially in education, as it is the medium of instruction from upper primary school onwards, so it shares the H role with Standard Malay. Another code that competes for the H role in some situations is the special palace register of Brunei Malay, which includes an elaborate system of honorific terms for addressing and referring to the Sultan and other nobles. Finally, although Standard Malay is used for sermons in the mosques (as expected for the H variety), readings from the Qur'an
are in Arabic.
, Catalan
as spoken outside of Catalonia may be diglossic in various grades, from highly to barely diglossic. Diglossia in Catalan is typically stronger in some metropolitan areas than rural or sparsely populated areas.
This phenomenon affects Alghero
(whose local Catalan dialect remains in severe danger of extinction despite the recent revival in its usage), some touristy areas and the main cities in the Balearic Islands
—sometimes competing with outside languages, for example English—, most of North Catalonia and, in its Valencian
modality, some areas in the Valencian Community
as well.
(Literary Chinese) as a formal standard written language. The standard written language served as a bridge for communication throughout China (and other countries in the CJKV area) for millennia.
However, the colloquial varieties of Chinese
continued to evolve. The gulf became so wide between the formal written and colloquial spoken languages that it was blamed for hindering education and literacy, and some even went so far as to blame it in part for the political turmoil that occurred in China during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This eventually culminated in the adoption of written vernacular Chinese, which was based on modern spoken Mandarin
, for all formal communication.
as the standard national dialect. However, standard Chinese and its pronunciation in local dialects is still a formal register
in regions where Mandarin is not spoken natively, such as most of South China
.
For instance in Hong Kong
, Cantonese
is the primary language of spoken communication, although all formal written communication is done in Mandarin. Unique among the other Chinese dialects, Cantonese has its own written form
, but it is used only in informal contexts and is often inconsistent due to the absence of standardization.
Literate Chinese speakers can read and write in the Mandarin-based standard written language. However because the graphemes in Chinese's logographic
writing system are not directly linked to pronunciation (though there are quasi-phonetic hints), Cantonese speakers who do not speak Mandarin will read aloud the characters
in Cantonese pronunciation only. The resulting speech is Mandarin-based grammar and vocabulary pronounced word-by-word in Cantonese. If the same sentence were to be spoken using regular colloquial Cantonese, it might be quite different. Here is an example:
In the above example, note the switching of the direct and indirect objects and the use of different vocabulary for certain words in the standard Chinese and colloquial Cantonese renditions. In addition, Cantonese grammar
allows the use of classifiers to serve in the place of a genitive
particle
.
Cantonese pronunciation of standard written Chinese is generally understandable to Cantonese speakers educated in the standard written language. It is most often used in Cantonese newscasts, albeit with certain substitutions of colloquial Cantonese vocabulary so as to make it not sound as stilted. This form of spoken Cantonese can be considered a higher register compared to the colloquial spoken Cantonese.
Continuing the previous example for comparison, using Classical Chinese it would be:
Because Chinese's logographic writing system doesn't indicate exact pronunciation, the pronunciation of Classical Chinese in Old Chinese
is generally not possible (though tentative reconstructions of the phonology of Old Chinese have been attempted). Instead, Classical Chinese is also generally pronounced according to the local dialect (such as the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations given above), much like how Cantonese speakers pronounce the modern Mandarin-based written Chinese using Cantonese.
Unlike the situation with modern Chinese, however, Classical Chinese spoken according to the pronunciations of the modern spoken Chinese varieties is still largely unintelligible without training due to the syntax and vocabulary changes that Chinese has undergone since Old Chinese. In addition, sound mergers in the modern dialects cause many distinct words in Classical Chinese to sound homophonous
. For one notable example, see Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
.
, Old English in its various dialects was spoken in England. For some centuries following the conquest, England experienced diglossia between a French-speaking ruling class and commoners who spoke English. As French gradually waned, English changed and took over until Middle and Modern English was created through the merger of this divide. However, there is still evidence of a division, between "academic" words and "common" words. Many "power" words (such as bailiff
) are "academic". Similarly, many words for foods use French-derived vocabulary, while the word for the corresponding animal is of Germanic (Old English) origin: for example, pork and swine, mutton and lamb, or beef and cow.
have traditionally been a diglossic system in Belgium's southern region, Wallonia. Similar diglossia occurs or has occurred in areas of France where other languages are dominant in the home and daily life, including French and Provençal
(Occitan) in Provence and southern France, and, prior to the mid-20th century, French and Alsatian
in Alsace-Lorraine
.
is regarded by most native speakers as inferior to the State language, Spanish, or Portuguese. Since the sixteenth century the upper layers of the Galician society, i.e. the town gentry, the civil servants and the Church, used Spanish as their main or only language whereas the vast majority of the population, made up of peasants and fishermen, continued to speak Galician. This entrenched a perception of Galician as a language of inferior people that prevented social promotion. Thus, when urbanization spread in earnest in the mid twentieth century the new middle classes and urban blue collar cohorts started to adopt Spanish in a diglossic context, Galician at home and Spanish at work. This is a situation that persists to a slightly lesser degree to this day even as both languages are official and the Galician language now enjoys a relatively strong industrial culture and media.
To make things more complicated a similar relationship exists between spoken Galician or Leonese and the literary standard that was developed when Galician became official language in 1983, as native speakers resent the fact the standard lacks naturality, does not include widely assumed phonetic or lexical features of the spoken language such as gheada
(pronouncing "g" as the English "h" as in /halicia/ instead of Galicia) as well as reintroducing Galician words that have long been replaced in the spoken language by their Spanish and in some cases English equivalents. Therefore it is not uncommon to find native Galician speakers that for instance speak colloquial Galician at home, Spanish at work and standard Galician in public events or when liaising with the Public Administration.
was almost entirely restricted as a written language, up until the early 20th century, when Northern pronunciation was accepted as Standard, and the language spread. In fact, in cities such as Hanover
and Berlin, the dialect started disappearing with the exception of a small minority of Low German speakers that only make up 5 million people. Austria also experienced the same situation, where less than 1,500,000 speakers of the dialect still remain. In most of Germany and Austria, people generally use Standard German rather than their local dialect in both informal and formal situations. This is the case of language loss, where speakers of German generally started using Standard rather than dialect. This is due to children mastering the Standard language at school and common media use of the Standard language. In Switzerland, most people, including children, generally use the dialect instead. See the Switzerland section for more information.
, the colloquial language which was used in everyday discussions and the extremely formal and archaic Katharevousa
, which was used in more "educated" contexts, as in school, in court, in law texts etc. Extreme Katharevousa was, in fact, nearly pure Ancient Greek
, and as such, nearly completely unintelligible to children and adults without higher education; however there was a linguistic spectrum, with so-called Simple Katharevousa quite close to Dimotiki, and the emerging urban standard of Dimotiki making more concessions to Katharevousa than its more radical form. The Greek language question
, from the 1890s on, was a heated dispute on which language form was to be the official language of the state: unlike typical diglossic situations, the primacy of the H variant was disputed, and the choice of variant became politicized, with Dimotiki associated with the left wing and Katharevousa with the right; morphological choices could even end up used as political shibboleths. This dispute was eventually settled, and today the single language used in all texts is an educated variant of Dimotiki, which was enriched by many expressions from Katharevousa. This variant is commonly called Modern Greek
.
The contemporary linguistic situation in Cyprus
is also diglossic, with Modern Greek taking the H role, and Cypriot Greek
the L role.
. Both are based on the same dialect: Khariboli
. Schiffman writes:
The L variety, Hindustani (often simply called Hindi) contains many loanwords from Persian and Arabic (brought by the Muslim rulers in medieval times), along with a massive vocabulary of English loanwords which increase day by day. The L variety is identical with spoken Urdu—except for the fact that the latter is written in Perso-Arabic script
. The H variety was standardized in the 1960s during the movement to adopt Hindi
as national language of Indian Union. Shuddh (lit., pure) Hindi primarily uses loanwords from Sanskrit to replace not only English loanwords, but also loanwords from Persian
and Arabic which had been nativized for centuries. These words are called tatsam
words, and they even replaced many tadbhav words, i.e. words with Sanskrit origin but having undergone profound phonological changes. The H variety was chiefly (though not exclusively) propounded by the Hindu nationalists (see Hindutva
) who frowned upon Persian and Arabic vocabulary because it came from Muslim cultures.
An example is the Hindi version of the sentence: "This morning I read the newspaper but could not study those books."
Here, prātaḥ, samāchār-patr(a) and parantu are loanwords from Sanskrit used in the H form, versus the Arabic loanwords subah, akhbār and lekin which are rather more popular in speech. Adhyayan is loanwords from Sanskrit which can even replace native tadhbhav word paḍhāī (which in turn is derived from Sanskrit paṭhana after phonological changes). Sanskrit morpho-phonemics is more complex than native Hindustani one, and hence many encounter difficulty in pronouncing phoneme clusters such as word-initial /pr/, word final /t̪r/ and word-middle /d̪ʱj/ as seen in the example above. On the other hand, the H form has highly minimized the use of Persian and Arabic phonemes /z/, /f/, /x/, /ɣ/ and /q/. Partly because they are written in the Hindi alphabet (devanagari
, strictly speaking an alpha-syllabary) as a dot beneath traditionally existing alphabets (ज़, फ़, ख़, ग़, क़ ), and the dot is omitted in casual writing, many Hindi speakers mistake them for the Sanskrit
phonemes /dʒ/, /pʰ/, /kʰ/, /ɡ/ and /k/.
The L variety is used in common speech, TV serials and Bollywood movies and songs. The H variety is used in official and government writings, scholarly books and magazines, signboards, public announcements and public speaking.
A similar situation is registered in areas in which a non-Romance languages are spoken in addition to Italian. Some non-Romance linguistic communities have been recognized by the State since the end of World War II, such as the German speakers in South Tyrol
and Slovene speakers in the provinces of Trieste
and Gorizia
. In these cases, most members of the minorities are fluent in both their native language and standard Italian, resulting in a situation of bilingualism rather than diglossy. In most other cases, there is a diglossic situation between Italian as H, and the non-Romance minority languages as L. Examples include: Molise Croats
, the Arabesh communities in southern Italy, Slovene speakers in Friulian Slovenia, the Resian dialect
in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and Alemannic German
speakers in Valle d'Aosta.
An interesting situation occurs in Valle d'Aosta, where the majority of the population is bilingual French-Italian, but live in a diglossic situation in regards to Franco-Provençal
.
, similar to what happened with AAVE due to the low creole variety developed alongside with the high standard variety. If AAVE is not considered a creole language, then Jamaican Patois is the creole most closest to Standard English to the point were a conversation might hold up. Jamaican Patois has a written form, but because of the lack of standardization of the language many words can be spelled in many different ways. Occasionally Jamaican Patois is used in school.
is a minority language in Spain and Portugal, affected by diglossia in both territories. Leonese language has been recognized in the Autonomy Statute of Castile and León
(Spain) but is not an official language. Leonese minorities in Portugal have no official recognition, and Mirandese was recognized officially by the Portuguese Parliament in 1999. In the case of the Leonese language, Leonese is used by a minority of people, and Spanish or Portuguese the majority. So Leonese language can be used just at home and between parents and relatives, while at work or in public Leonese regional Spanish is the widely used language. Leonese language only recognised in 2007. 16 schools offer the possibility of learning Leonese language as an out-school activity for children from 10 to 12 years old.
is officially a bilingual country: both Maltese
and English are official languages. Maltese is a Semitic language with extensive Italian influence.
Maltese society has been traditionally quite strongly divided, politically, between the working class and middle and upper classes and this is reflected in their language use. Although all Maltese can speak their native language, the extent to which one uses and is able to speak English often reflects one's background. This is most clearly illustrated by the different newspapers in Malta: the liberal/conservative ones are in English (with names like the Times of Malta and Malta Independent) and the more left-leaning ones are in Maltese. Maltese people of a middle- and upper-class background will often speak English or use code-switching
extensively in public. There have been warnings from several quarters including a linguistics professor from the University of Malta
that the Maltese language could become endangered if the government (currently the right of centre Nationalists) does not do more to promote it, in the same way that English displaced Welsh
in Wales.
Before 1934, Italian was the official language of Malta. Those in higher class positions spoke Italian, and were often associated with the Italian irredenta movement, which promoted the unification of Malta with Italy. It was only those of lower class at the time, whose ancestors came from Sicily
too long ago for them to still be fluent in Italian, who spoke Maltese. Today, the influence of the Italian language is still very present in Malta. Not only is it used in the professional workplace but also it is key to Malta's media, such as television, radio and publications.
, both modern-day Spanish and Guaraní
indigenous language are spoken, and both are official and taught in schools. But great part of the population speak an informal, barely codified variant of the latter, with many Spanish influences, called Jopará
.
, with respect to the upper class of the Polish society within the Kingdom of Poland, most especially landed nobility, was a low language until Jan Kochanowski
stopped writing in Latin
, the high language of the time, and decided to use his own native Polish as the literary language during the late sixteenth century. Polish, however, was often, but not always, the high language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
in spite of the early Belarusian
being the official language.
and those trying to emulate them, over-pronounced the words with hard "h" such as "" ("hook" in Polish) to know when to spell a word with "h", and when to spell the soft "h" sound with "ch" as in "" ("bread" in Polish). An example of a person using this method to spell properly is Jerzy Petersburski
.
) and African languages, while H-variant would be based on 19th century European Portuguese
(and very similar to Standard European Portuguese, with only minor differences in spelling and grammar usage). Mário A. Perini, a Brazilian linguist, even compares the depth of the differences between L- and H- variants of Brazilian Portuguese with those between Standard Spanish and Standard Portuguese. Milton M. Azevedo wrote a chapter on diglossia in his monography: Portuguese language (A linguistic introduction), published by Cambridge University Press, in 2005, parts of which are available freely on Google books.
till the Baroque
period while Church Slavonic served for all official purposes.
/ Arabicized Urdu (used by the literary elite such as poets, writers, and Government officials), and a colloquial Urdu that is very similar to colloquial Hindi
(spoken by common people, and known as Hindustani
among linguists). Colloquial Pakistani Urdu is also highly influenced by Punjabi
. As English is the official language of Pakistan, there is a degree of diglossia between the upper and middle and lower classes. The upper and upper-middle classes tend to be educated in English medium schools whereas the lower class are schooled in either Urdu or one of the regional languages (usually Pashto or Sindhi
). The language of the bureaucracy and the higher courts is English, but there is a high degree of code switching between Urdu, English and regional languages in the parliament, provincial legislatures and private sector.
and English.
(also known as Literary Sinhala, LS) and the spoken language
(Spoken Sinhala, SS), especially about verbs:
Literary or written Sinhala is commonly understood, and used in literary texts and formal occasions (public speeches, TV and radio news broadcasts, etc.), whereas the spoken language is used as the language of communication in everyday life. Children are taught the written language at school almost like a foreign language.
') constituting the L variety. SStdE is similar to other varieties of Standard English
in grammar and lexis
but with some of its own features of pronunciation, particularly the use of full vowel
s (rather than [ə]) in most function words and also the sporadic absence of dental fricative
s, while SCE is characterised by a simplified grammar (including the omission of some conjunctions and the copula verb BE) and regular use of pragmatic particles such as lah and ah, as well as frequent inclusion of Hokkien and Malay words.
However, other analysts prefer to see variation in the English spoken in Singapore along a continuum, with the style adopted depending on the education level and circumstances of the conversation. Some proficient speakers who are well-educated have been shown to use mostly SStdE but with lots of pragmatic particles when talking to their friends, and this seems to provide evidence to support the continuum analysis.
It is certainly true that speakers are able to switch quite abruptly, for example as they exit a classroom and start chatting to their friends, so one way or another there are many characteristics of diglossia in spoken Singapore English.
is often used as an example of diglossia. In German-speaking Switzerland, Swiss German is used in everyday conversations, as every German speaking Swiss is diglossic. Unlike Austria and Germany, where Standard German replaced the local dialect, dialects are still in much use. Swiss German is also used to a certain extent in school and church practices. Swiss Standard German
is almost entirely restricted as a written language, as spoken Swiss Standard German is only in extremely formal conversations such as news broadcasts.
is the language spoken in the southern part of Luzon
, the northernmost group of islands in the Philippines. Southern Luzon covers the provinces around the capital Metro Manila, and includes the capital itself. The language spoken by majority of residents of Luzon, Tagalog, is the basis for the country's national language, Filipino
, which is basically the standardized form of the Tagalog spoken in Metro Manila. Tagalogs (ethnic group) originating from provinces outside of Metro Manila speak their own dialect of Tagalog. An example is of the province Batangas, which has its own dialect of Batangueño Tagalog
. Speakers of Batangueño Tagalog who go to Manila often suppress their dialect and accent, eventually learning to use the Manila dialect. They would speak their native dialect only when they gather with others of their group. Also, having a regional accent is usually met with amusement, but it is not frowned upon. And although there are some who would maintain their accents, their use is very minimal outside their hometowns and peers. At the moment, very little is written using any other dialect of Tagalog other than that of Metro Manila.
is a diglossic language spoken in Tamil Nadu
, a state in southern India and Northern,Eastern Regions of Sri Lanka. The classic form of the language – called "Senthamizh" – is different from the spoken form known since ancient times as Iyatramizh.
The classic form is preferred for writing, and is also used for public speaking. While the written Tamil language is mostly standard across various Tamil-speaking regions, the spoken form of the language differs widely from the written form. The diglossic form of Tamil has held back its development as a language. Therefore, Perunchitthranar, a Tamil nationalist and others of his ilk, advocated that all Tamils speak only the pure form of the language, i.e., Senthamizh.
Tamil fiction-writers use "Senthamizh" for all descriptive writing and use "Iyatramizh" only to narrate conversations between the characters in their works. There have been exceptions to this rule. Noted novelist Kalki Krishnamurthy
once dismissed "Senthamizh" as "Kodunthamizh" (tortured Tamil) although his novels are written almost entirely in Senthamizh, both description and conversation. Even though all Tamils—no matter how educated they are—always converse in colloquial Tamil, Tamil novels used to depict educated people speaking in the classic form. Several decades ago, most Tamil movies had characters who spoke in classical Tamil.
Regional and caste differences can be distinctly heard in spoken Tamil. Tamil in the state capital Chennai (formerly Madras) is somewhat distinct from that spoken elsewhere. Due to its proximity to Andhra Pradesh
, Chennai Tamil has more Telugu
loan words than the Tamil spoken in southern Tamil Nadu. Chennai Iyatramizh also often has more words of Urdu
(or Deccani) than do varieties of Tamil from elsewhere in the state.
Throughout Tamil Nadu, there are several varieties of spoken Tamil. Tamil Brahmins speak a sort of "brahmin Tamil". The largely agrarian middle castes converse in their own dialect of Iyatramizh; this is the 'standard' spoken Tamil of today's Tamil movies and fiction. Similarly, the Scheduled Castes speak forms of Iyatramizh with clear grammatical differences from the varieties of other castes.
However, regional differences are more interesting to note. The Tamil dialects spoken by people in Northern districts of Tamil Nadu like Arcot, Chennai and Southern districts like Tirunelveli and Madurai are somewhat different from each other. The people from Kanyakumari speak entirely a different version which is a mixture of Tamil and Malayalam, but uniquely Kanyakumari. similar to Like in other parts of the world, the dialectical differences between various regions are vanishing due to the influence of mass communications. So apparently are the differences between the speech patterns of the various caste groupings in Tamil Nadu. It is important to note that all forms of spoken Tamil have always been mutually intelligible. Also see Tamil dialects for dialectical variations in Iyatramizh
communities is diglossic. Translated into the school or the classroom situation, by 'being diglossic' is meant that these communities have accepted norms of linguistic excellence, the teaching of which is the purpose of the language teaching curriculum in the school. This normative variety of language is the one that people are expected to write. It is distinct from the various spoken dialects in grammar
, lexis and phonology in spite of the shared features which make them mutually comprehensible to some extent. Similar situations are known in almost all language teaching activities everywhere, but, the linguistic
values associated with diglossia are different from the overtones of 'good usage' that all teachers of all languages attempt to inculcate in the learners.
, Laada Bilaniuk (University of Michigan) administered surveys to 2,000 participants in Ukraine. In her article "Diglossia in Flux: Language and Ethnicity in Ukraine", Bilaniuk reports that until now, Russian has been the High language and Ukrainian
the Low language. However, her data shows that diglossia in Ukraine
is shifting.
With the language policy of the Ukrainian government, and the continued use of Russian in many parts of the country, there are many places (including Kiev
, Odessa, the Crimea
, and the eastern part of the country) where people use Russian for everyday speech but Ukrainian for official purposes and street signs. Consequently, Russian is now the Low language and Ukrainian the High, which is a reversal from their relative position before Ukraine's independence.
Yavorska Galyna M. Prescriptyvna lingvistyka yak dyskurs: Mova, kultura, vlada (Prescriptive linguistics as a discourse: Language. Culture. Power). Kiev, VIPOL, 2000. 288 p.
Yavorska G. Do problemy naivnoyi linguistyky (On the problem of folk linguistics). – Lingvistychni studii. Cherkassy, 1999, #3:13–20.
Yavorska G. Dejaki osoblyvosti movnykh kontaktiv blyz'kosporidnenykh mov (do kharakterystyky ukrain's'koho puryzmu) (On contacts of closely related languages: some features of Ukrainian purism). In memoriam of K. Trofymovych. L'viv, Litopys, 1998.
"A typology of surzhyk: mixed Ukrainian-Russian language". International Journal of Bilingualism 8(4):409–425.
"Gender, language attitudes, and language status in Ukraine". Language in Society. 32:47–78.
"Pidsvidome stavlennia do mov: zerkalo movnoï polityky". (Subconscious language attitudes: a mirror of language politics.) 'Urok Ukraïnskoï (Ukrainian journal for educators and language planners). Kiev. 7:5–8. [Based on 1998 "Purity & power" data.]
"Kartyna movnoho svitohliadu v Ukraïni". (Linguistic ideology in Ukraine). Movoznavstvo (major Ukrainian linguistics journal). 4/5:44–51. [Based on 1997 "Matching guises" data.]
"Movna krytyka i samovpevnenist': ideolohichni vplyvy na status mov v Ukraïni". [Linguistic criticism and self-confidence: ideological influences on language status in Ukraine]. Derzhavnist' ukraïns'koï movy i movnyi dosvid svitu: materially mizhnarodnoï konferentsiï. Kiev: National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Pp. 131–138.
"Speaking of surzhyk: ideologies and mixed languages". Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 21(1/2):93–117.
"Purity and power: the geography of language ideology in Ukraine". Michigan Discussions in Anthropology 13:165–189.
"Matching guises and mapping language ideologies in Ukraine". Texas Linguistic Forum 37:298–310.
Diglossia
In linguistics, diglossia refers to a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety , a second, highly codified variety is used in certain situations such as literature, formal...
refers to the use by a language community of two languages or dialects, a "high" or "H" variety restricted to certain formal situations, and a "low" or "L" variety for everyday interaction. This page contains a list of nations, cultures, or other communities which sources describe as featuring a diglossic language situation.
African American Vernacular English
In the United States, Standard EnglishStandard English
Standard English refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country...
is considered H while AAVE is considered L. Its pronunciation
Pronunciation
Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect....
is, in some respects, common to Southern American English
Southern American English
Southern American English is a group of dialects of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from Southern and Eastern Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast, and from the Atlantic coast to most of Texas and Oklahoma.The Southern dialects make...
, which is spoken by many African Americans and many non-African Americans in the United States. Several creolists, including William Stewart, John Dillard, and John Rickford, argue that AAVE shares so many characteristics with creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
dialects spoken by black people in much of the world that AAVE itself is a creole, while others maintain that there are no significant parallels. Many traditional middle-class and upper-class African Americans are more comfortable with American Standard English.
Arabic
In all the Arab WorldArab world
The Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the...
, standard Arabic is H and local "colloquial" Arabic is L.
The situation with the Literary Arabic
Literary Arabic
Modern Standard Arabic , Standard Arabic, or Literary Arabic is the standard and literary variety of Arabic used in writing and in most formal speech....
(الفصحى al-fuṣ-ḥā) vs spoken varieties of Arabic
Varieties of Arabic
The Arabic language is a Semitic language characterized by a wide number of linguistic varieties within its five regional forms. The largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. The Arabic of North Africa, for example, is often incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker...
(العامية al-`āmmiyya or الدارجة ad-dārija) differs from country to country but every Arab country's official language is "standard Arabic". There is no consensus on which version of Arabic should be taught to foreigners.
The debate continues about the future of the Arabic language, both among Arabic linguists in the Arab world and outside it. Some prefer the status quo (existing diglossia). The other suggestions are:
- Promote Modern Standard Arabic to be used colloquially, outside the formal situations, on an everyday basis by introducing more audio-material, enforcing the usage on mass-media. A lot of cartoons were created in MSA, which help young Arabs master the standard language before they start schooling. There are proposals to simplify the grammar of the standard Arabic a little (the most complicated and seldom used and understood features) and introduce some commonly known colloquial words (known across many dialects or groups of dialects). This idea is similar to the efforts in mainland ChinaMainland ChinaMainland China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term that refers to the area under the jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China . According to the Taipei-based Mainland Affairs Council, the term excludes the PRC Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and...
, TaiwanTaiwanTaiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
and SingaporeSingaporeSingapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
where MandarinStandard ChineseStandard Chinese, or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....
has gained a lot of popularity and the number of speakers is increasing, including those who speak it on a daily basis; or the situation with the Hebrew languageHebrew languageHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
, especially in Israel (see Revival of the Hebrew language); or the situation with Standard German in Austria and Germany (excluding Switzerland: see Switzerland section) in where the Standard language gained so much popularity people gave up their dialect in exchange for Standard German. - Upgrade the individual dialects or merge dialects into possibly one spoken Arabic, thus formalizing spoken Arabic as a standard. Often it is advocated in individual Arabic countries, promoting only the main dialect of the given country. This idea was especially popular in EgyptEgyptEgypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, where spoken Egyptian is often written down and there are works in Egyptian ArabicEgyptian ArabicEgyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
(لهجة مصرية lahja Miṣriyya (in formal Arabic) or lahga Maṣreyya (in Egyptian dialect) – "Egyptian dialect") and other countries, e.g. Kateb YacineKateb YacineKateb Yacine was an Algerian writer notable for his novels and plays, both in French and Algerian Arabic dialect, and his advocacy of the Algerian Berber cause.-Biography:...
wrote in Algerian ArabicAlgerian ArabicAlgerian Arabic is the variety or varieties of Arabic spoken in Algeria. In Algeria, as elsewhere, spoken Arabic differs from written Arabic; Algerian Arabic has a vocabulary mostly Arabic, with significant Berber substrates, and many new words and loanwords borrowed from French, Turkish and...
(لهجة جزائرية lahja Jazā'iriyya – "Algerian dialect"). The "formal spoken Arabic" includes more features of the standard Arabic and words are often selected, which are understood across a larger area. One such a version of "Formal Spoken Arabic" (based on Levantine ArabicLevantine ArabicLevantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
) is taught at Georgetown UniversityGeorgetown UniversityGeorgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...
and Foreign Service InstituteForeign Service InstituteThe Foreign Service Institute is the United States Federal Government's primary training institution for employees of the U.S. foreign affairs community, preparing American diplomats and other professionals to advance U.S. foreign affairs interests overseas and in Washington...
(both in the USA) . This second idea is similar to Evolution from Ancient to Modern Greek in Greece. Many Arabic scholars are against this idea, as the current standard Arabic is perceived to be essentially "classical ArabicClassical ArabicClassical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...
", the language of Qur'ānQur'anThe Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
(القرآن al-qur’ān), and is the literary standard in the Arab worldArab worldThe Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the...
.
Both ideas (the Hebrew (1) or the Greek (2) language reforms) have become feasible with the globalization and the increase of the internet and mass-media usage among Arabs but there must be consensus between governments, scholars and the population and the efforts to follow. The Al-Jazeera television and others did a lot to promote standard Arabic among Arabs.
Ibrahim Kayid Mahmoud, College of Education, King Faisal University, Al-Hassa – Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on Literary Arabic between Diglossia and Bilingualism (excerpt):
The study has concluded that both diglossia and bilingualism are the inveterate enemies of literary Arabic; they try to annihilate it. They create a weak, hesitant, indecisive anxious individual, with limited horizons.
Additionally, they constitute the direct cause of destroying creativity and scientific productivity. It is therefore imperative to protect Literary Arabic from the dangers of diglossia and bilingualism through taking the necessary measures to foster it and to give it due emphasis. Literary Arabic should be simplified and made more appealing to the younger generations. Educational institutions and mass media should also give it due emphasis. Current educational concepts should be utilized to promote literary Arabic. Arabic teachers should be adequately qualified. It is finally suggested that the teaching of foreign languages should be delayed until after age ten, a time at which Arab children have initially mastered their mother tongue – Arabic."
As mentioned above, the new Western term "Formal Spoken Arabic" (other terms include: "Educated Spoken Arabic", "Inter-Arabic", "Middle Arabic" and "Spoken MSA") is to describe the modern variety of Arabic spoken by educated Arabs, a mix between standard Arabic (acrolect) and vernacular Arabic (basilect). It is more common in Eastern Arabs states (Levante and the Gulf
Arab states of the Persian Gulf
"Arab states of the Persian Gulf" or "Arab Persian Gulf states" or "Persian Gulf Arab states" or "Arabic Persian Gulf states" or "Arab States of The Gulf", are terms that refer to the six Arab states of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, bordering the Persian Gulf....
) but sometimes used to described high-level Egyptian or Maghrebi Arabic. This new term represents a spoken language shared by Arabs from different regions when they have to communicate to each other. The pronunciation may reveal the speaker's origin but nevertheless, this simplified version of Arabic is becoming popular with foreign students who wish to be able communicate with a wide-range of Arabic speakers. As the base for the training, the Levantine Arabic
Levantine Arabic
Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
is often chosen, as the one considered by many as the closest to literary Arabic but teachers and students change according to the knowledge and interest. In Western Arab countries and Egypt the pure colloquial forms of Arabic are more dominant and, generally, knowledge and usage of standard Arabic is limited. Some speakers can easily maintain a conversation in standard Arabic, some prefer to switch to their vernacular dialect even in the formal situations.
Formal Spoken Arabic has been created through the impact of the Arab satellite channels, which are increasingly shaping the region's sociopolitical views, while also affecting the Arabic language itself.
Bengali
Traditionally, BengaliBengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
exhibits diglossia in both written and spoken forms of the language's uppermost registers. Shadhubhasha (সাধু shadhu = 'chaste' or 'sage'; ভাষা bhasha = 'language') exhibited longer verb inflections and heavily Sanskritized vocabulary. Up to the turn of the 19th century, most Bengali literature took this form. Cholitbhasha(চলতিভাষা ) or Cholitobhasha (চলিত cholito = 'current' or 'running'), based on the formal registers of spoken, educated dialects, has much simpler grammatical forms, and has become the modern literary standard.
Brunei Malay
In BruneiBrunei
Brunei , officially the State of Brunei Darussalam or the Nation of Brunei, the Abode of Peace , is a sovereign state located on the north coast of the island of Borneo, in Southeast Asia...
, Standard Malay
Malay language
Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...
(Bahasa Melayu) is promoted as the national language and is the H variety, while Brunei Malay is used very widely throughout society and it constitutes the L variety. One major difference between these dialects of Malay is that Brunei Malay tends to have the verb at the front, while Standard Malay generally places it after the subject. It has been estimated that 84% of core vocabulary in Brunei Malay and Standard Malay is cognate, though their pronunciation often differs very considerably. While Standard Malay has six vowels, Brunei Malay has only three: /a, i, u/.
One complicating factor is that English is also widely used in Brunei, especially in education, as it is the medium of instruction from upper primary school onwards, so it shares the H role with Standard Malay. Another code that competes for the H role in some situations is the special palace register of Brunei Malay, which includes an elaborate system of honorific terms for addressing and referring to the Sultan and other nobles. Finally, although Standard Malay is used for sermons in the mosques (as expected for the H variety), readings from the Qur'an
Qur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
are in Arabic.
Bolivia
Modern Spanish coexists with 36 other native languages, all of them official, and some widely spoken by the population, like Aymara and Quechua.Catalan
With the exception of AndorraAndorra
Andorra , officially the Principality of Andorra , also called the Principality of the Valleys of Andorra, , is a small landlocked country in southwestern Europe, located in the eastern Pyrenees mountains and bordered by Spain and France. It is the sixth smallest nation in Europe having an area of...
, Catalan
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
as spoken outside of Catalonia may be diglossic in various grades, from highly to barely diglossic. Diglossia in Catalan is typically stronger in some metropolitan areas than rural or sparsely populated areas.
This phenomenon affects Alghero
Alghero
Alghero , is a town of about 44,000 inhabitants in Italy. It lies in the province of Sassari in northwestern Sardinia, next to the sea.-History:The area of today's Alghero has been settled since pre-historic times...
(whose local Catalan dialect remains in severe danger of extinction despite the recent revival in its usage), some touristy areas and the main cities in the Balearic Islands
Balearic Islands
The Balearic Islands are an archipelago of Spain in the western Mediterranean Sea, near the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula.The four largest islands are: Majorca, Minorca, Ibiza and Formentera. The archipelago forms an autonomous community and a province of Spain with Palma as the capital...
—sometimes competing with outside languages, for example English—, most of North Catalonia and, in its Valencian
Valencian
Valencian is the traditional and official name of the Catalan language in the Valencian Community. There are dialectical differences from standard Catalan, and under the Valencian Statute of Autonomy, the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua has been established as its regulator...
modality, some areas in the Valencian Community
Valencian Community
The Valencian Community is an autonomous community of Spain located in central and south-eastern Iberian Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Valencia...
as well.
Chinese
For over two thousand years, the Chinese used Classical ChineseClassical Chinese
Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
(Literary Chinese) as a formal standard written language. The standard written language served as a bridge for communication throughout China (and other countries in the CJKV area) for millennia.
However, the colloquial varieties of Chinese
Varieties of Chinese
Chinese comprises many regional language varieties sometimes grouped together as the Chinese dialects, the primary ones being Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. These are not mutually intelligible, and even many of the regional varieties are themselves composed of a number of...
continued to evolve. The gulf became so wide between the formal written and colloquial spoken languages that it was blamed for hindering education and literacy, and some even went so far as to blame it in part for the political turmoil that occurred in China during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This eventually culminated in the adoption of written vernacular Chinese, which was based on modern spoken Mandarin
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese, or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....
, for all formal communication.
Modern Chinese
After the adoption of vernacular Chinese as the modern standard written language in the early 20th century, diglossia was no longer a big issue among the majority of Chinese speakers who learn Mandarin ChineseStandard Chinese
Standard Chinese, or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....
as the standard national dialect. However, standard Chinese and its pronunciation in local dialects is still a formal register
Register (sociolinguistics)
In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting an English speaker may be more likely to adhere more closely to prescribed grammar, pronounce words ending in -ing with a velar nasal...
in regions where Mandarin is not spoken natively, such as most of South China
Northern and southern China
Northern China and southern China are two approximate regions within China. The exact boundary between these two regions has never been precisely defined...
.
For instance in Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
, Cantonese
Standard Cantonese
Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is a language that originated in the vicinity of Canton in southern China, and is often regarded as the prestige dialect of Yue Chinese....
is the primary language of spoken communication, although all formal written communication is done in Mandarin. Unique among the other Chinese dialects, Cantonese has its own written form
Written Cantonese
Cantonese has the most well-developed written form of all Chinese varieties apart from the standard varieties of Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Standard written Chinese is based on Mandarin, but when spoken word for word as Cantonese, it sounds unnatural because its expressions are ungrammatical...
, but it is used only in informal contexts and is often inconsistent due to the absence of standardization.
Literate Chinese speakers can read and write in the Mandarin-based standard written language. However because the graphemes in Chinese's logographic
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
writing system are not directly linked to pronunciation (though there are quasi-phonetic hints), Cantonese speakers who do not speak Mandarin will read aloud the characters
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
in Cantonese pronunciation only. The resulting speech is Mandarin-based grammar and vocabulary pronounced word-by-word in Cantonese. If the same sentence were to be spoken using regular colloquial Cantonese, it might be quite different. Here is an example:
| English Sentence | Please give me his book. |
| Standard written Chinese rendition (Traditional Chinese character Traditional Chinese character Traditional Chinese characters refers to Chinese characters in any character set which does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. It most commonly refers to characters in the standardized character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong, or in the Kangxi... s) |
|
| Standard written Chinese rendition (Simplified Chinese character Simplified Chinese character Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao for use in Mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of many standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language... s) |
|
| Standard Chinese pronunciation of writing | Qǐng gěi wǒ tā de shū. |
| Cantonese pronunciation of writing | Chíng kāp ngóh tā dīk syū. |
| Written colloquial Cantonese rendition | |
| Colloquial Cantonese pronunciation | M̀h-gōi béi kéuih bún syū ngóh. |
- Note: Mandarin romanized using Hanyu PinyinPinyinPinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
. Cantonese romanized using YaleYale RomanizationThe Yale romanizations are four systems created at Yale University for romanizing the four East Asian languages of Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese...
. Written CantoneseWritten CantoneseCantonese has the most well-developed written form of all Chinese varieties apart from the standard varieties of Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Standard written Chinese is based on Mandarin, but when spoken word for word as Cantonese, it sounds unnatural because its expressions are ungrammatical...
shown uses characters not in standard written Chinese.
In the above example, note the switching of the direct and indirect objects and the use of different vocabulary for certain words in the standard Chinese and colloquial Cantonese renditions. In addition, Cantonese grammar
Cantonese grammar
Cantonese is an analytic language where, in a sentence, the arrangement of words is important to its meaning. A basic sentence is in form of SVO, i.e. a subject is followed by a verb then by an object, though this order is often violated because Cantonese is a Topic-prominent language. Unlike...
allows the use of classifiers to serve in the place of a genitive
Genitive case
In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...
particle
Grammatical particle
In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
.
Cantonese pronunciation of standard written Chinese is generally understandable to Cantonese speakers educated in the standard written language. It is most often used in Cantonese newscasts, albeit with certain substitutions of colloquial Cantonese vocabulary so as to make it not sound as stilted. This form of spoken Cantonese can be considered a higher register compared to the colloquial spoken Cantonese.
Classical Chinese
Before the modern adoption of written vernacular Chinese, the diglossic situation also applied to Mandarin speakers when Classical Chinese was the standard written language.Continuing the previous example for comparison, using Classical Chinese it would be:
| Classical Chinese rendition (Traditional Chinese character Traditional Chinese character Traditional Chinese characters refers to Chinese characters in any character set which does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. It most commonly refers to characters in the standardized character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong, or in the Kangxi... s) |
|
| Classical Chinese rendition (Simplified Chinese character Simplified Chinese character Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao for use in Mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of many standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language... s) |
|
| Mandarin pronunciation of Classical Chinese | Qiú ěr yǔ wǒ qí shū. |
| Cantonese pronunciation of Classical Chinese | Kàuh yíh yúh ngóh kèih syū. |
Because Chinese's logographic writing system doesn't indicate exact pronunciation, the pronunciation of Classical Chinese in Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
is generally not possible (though tentative reconstructions of the phonology of Old Chinese have been attempted). Instead, Classical Chinese is also generally pronounced according to the local dialect (such as the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations given above), much like how Cantonese speakers pronounce the modern Mandarin-based written Chinese using Cantonese.
Unlike the situation with modern Chinese, however, Classical Chinese spoken according to the pronunciations of the modern spoken Chinese varieties is still largely unintelligible without training due to the syntax and vocabulary changes that Chinese has undergone since Old Chinese. In addition, sound mergers in the modern dialects cause many distinct words in Classical Chinese to sound homophonous
Homophone
A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose and rose , or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms...
. For one notable example, see Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is a famous example of constrained writing by Yuen Ren Chao which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin....
.
English and the Norman invasion
Prior to the Norman invasion of 1066Norman conquest of England
The Norman conquest of England began on 28 September 1066 with the invasion of England by William, Duke of Normandy. William became known as William the Conqueror after his victory at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, defeating King Harold II of England...
, Old English in its various dialects was spoken in England. For some centuries following the conquest, England experienced diglossia between a French-speaking ruling class and commoners who spoke English. As French gradually waned, English changed and took over until Middle and Modern English was created through the merger of this divide. However, there is still evidence of a division, between "academic" words and "common" words. Many "power" words (such as bailiff
Bailiff
A bailiff is a governor or custodian ; a legal officer to whom some degree of authority, care or jurisdiction is committed...
) are "academic". Similarly, many words for foods use French-derived vocabulary, while the word for the corresponding animal is of Germanic (Old English) origin: for example, pork and swine, mutton and lamb, or beef and cow.
French
Standard French and WalloonWalloon language
Walloon is a Romance language which was spoken as a primary language in large portions of the Walloon Region of Belgium and some villages of Northern France until the middle of the 20th century. It belongs to the langue d'oïl language family, whose most prominent member is the French language...
have traditionally been a diglossic system in Belgium's southern region, Wallonia. Similar diglossia occurs or has occurred in areas of France where other languages are dominant in the home and daily life, including French and Provençal
Provençal language
Provençal is a dialect of Occitan spoken by a minority of people in southern France, mostly in Provence. In the English-speaking world, "Provençal" is often used to refer to all dialects of Occitan, but it actually refers specifically to the dialect spoken in Provence."Provençal" is also the...
(Occitan) in Provence and southern France, and, prior to the mid-20th century, French and Alsatian
Alsatian language
Alsatian is a Low Alemannic German dialect spoken in most of Alsace, a region in eastern France which has passed between French and German control many times.-Language family:...
in Alsace-Lorraine
Alsace-Lorraine
The Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine was a territory created by the German Empire in 1871 after it annexed most of Alsace and the Moselle region of Lorraine following its victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The Alsatian part lay in the Rhine Valley on the west bank of the Rhine River and east...
.
Galician
Galicia is a classic example of diglossia, as the majority language GalicianGalician language
Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...
is regarded by most native speakers as inferior to the State language, Spanish, or Portuguese. Since the sixteenth century the upper layers of the Galician society, i.e. the town gentry, the civil servants and the Church, used Spanish as their main or only language whereas the vast majority of the population, made up of peasants and fishermen, continued to speak Galician. This entrenched a perception of Galician as a language of inferior people that prevented social promotion. Thus, when urbanization spread in earnest in the mid twentieth century the new middle classes and urban blue collar cohorts started to adopt Spanish in a diglossic context, Galician at home and Spanish at work. This is a situation that persists to a slightly lesser degree to this day even as both languages are official and the Galician language now enjoys a relatively strong industrial culture and media.
To make things more complicated a similar relationship exists between spoken Galician or Leonese and the literary standard that was developed when Galician became official language in 1983, as native speakers resent the fact the standard lacks naturality, does not include widely assumed phonetic or lexical features of the spoken language such as gheada
Gheada
Gheada is a linguistic phenomenon of Galician which consists of pronouncing the phoneme /g/ as /ħ/ or, more commonly, /h/ , similar to the [h] in English house...
(pronouncing "g" as the English "h" as in /halicia/ instead of Galicia) as well as reintroducing Galician words that have long been replaced in the spoken language by their Spanish and in some cases English equivalents. Therefore it is not uncommon to find native Galician speakers that for instance speak colloquial Galician at home, Spanish at work and standard Galician in public events or when liaising with the Public Administration.
German
Up until recently, Standard GermanStandard German
Standard German is the standard variety of the German language used as a written language, in formal contexts, and for communication between different dialect areas...
was almost entirely restricted as a written language, up until the early 20th century, when Northern pronunciation was accepted as Standard, and the language spread. In fact, in cities such as Hanover
Hanover
Hanover or Hannover, on the river Leine, is the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony , Germany and was once by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of Great Britain, under their title as the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg...
and Berlin, the dialect started disappearing with the exception of a small minority of Low German speakers that only make up 5 million people. Austria also experienced the same situation, where less than 1,500,000 speakers of the dialect still remain. In most of Germany and Austria, people generally use Standard German rather than their local dialect in both informal and formal situations. This is the case of language loss, where speakers of German generally started using Standard rather than dialect. This is due to children mastering the Standard language at school and common media use of the Standard language. In Switzerland, most people, including children, generally use the dialect instead. See the Switzerland section for more information.
Greek
Until the 1970s, the Greek language distinguished between DimotikiDimotiki
Demotic Greek or dimotiki is the modern vernacular form of the Greek language. The term has been in use since 1818. Demotic refers particularly to the form of the language that evolved naturally from ancient Greek, in opposition to the artificially archaic Katharevousa, which was the official...
, the colloquial language which was used in everyday discussions and the extremely formal and archaic Katharevousa
Katharevousa
Katharevousa , is a form of the Greek language conceived in the early 19th century as a compromise between Ancient Greek and the Modern Greek of the time, with a vocabulary largely based on ancient forms, but a much-simplified grammar. Originally, it was widely used both for literary and official...
, which was used in more "educated" contexts, as in school, in court, in law texts etc. Extreme Katharevousa was, in fact, nearly pure Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
, and as such, nearly completely unintelligible to children and adults without higher education; however there was a linguistic spectrum, with so-called Simple Katharevousa quite close to Dimotiki, and the emerging urban standard of Dimotiki making more concessions to Katharevousa than its more radical form. The Greek language question
Greek language question
The Greek language question was a dispute discussing the question whether the language of the Greek people or a cultivated imitation of Ancient Greek should be the official language of the Greek nation. It was a highly controversial topic in the 19th and 20th centuries and was finally resolved...
, from the 1890s on, was a heated dispute on which language form was to be the official language of the state: unlike typical diglossic situations, the primacy of the H variant was disputed, and the choice of variant became politicized, with Dimotiki associated with the left wing and Katharevousa with the right; morphological choices could even end up used as political shibboleths. This dispute was eventually settled, and today the single language used in all texts is an educated variant of Dimotiki, which was enriched by many expressions from Katharevousa. This variant is commonly called Modern Greek
Modern Greek
Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic...
.
The contemporary linguistic situation in Cyprus
Cyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
is also diglossic, with Modern Greek taking the H role, and Cypriot Greek
Cypriot Greek
The Cypriot dialect of Modern Greek, known as Kypriaka , Cypriot Greek is spoken by 750,000 people in Cyprus and diaspora Greek Cypriots.Cypriot Greek is distinct enough that it can be classified as a distinct dialect of the Standard Greek....
the L role.
Hindi
Hindi has two forms: the H form called shuddha Hindi and the L form called HindustaniHindustani language
Hindi-Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language and the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan. It is also known as Hindustani , and historically, as Hindavi or Rekhta...
. Both are based on the same dialect: Khariboli
Khariboli
Khariboli , also Khari Boli, Khadiboli, Khadi Boli or simply Khari, is a Western Hindi dialect spoken mainly in the rural surroundings of Delhi, the northern areas of Western Uttar Pradesh and the southern areas of Uttarakhand in India...
. Schiffman writes:
Hindi is not the national language of India, India does not have any national language. Some steps were taken to develop an H variety, highly Sanskritized in vocabulary, since the vernaculars of Hindi then in existence seemed to be too "Low" for many citizens of the country. Of course diglossicization as a value may vary from sub-culture to sub-culture in the region, but it cannot be denied that the overall view in South Asia and peninsular Southeast Asia is pro-diglossic.
The L variety, Hindustani (often simply called Hindi) contains many loanwords from Persian and Arabic (brought by the Muslim rulers in medieval times), along with a massive vocabulary of English loanwords which increase day by day. The L variety is identical with spoken Urdu—except for the fact that the latter is written in Perso-Arabic script
Perso-Arabic script
The Persian or Perso-Arabic alphabet is a writing system based on the Arabic script. Originally used exclusively for the Arabic language, the Arabic alphabet was adapted to the Persian language, adding four letters: , , , and . Many languages which use the Perso-Arabic script add other letters...
. The H variety was standardized in the 1960s during the movement to adopt Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
as national language of Indian Union. Shuddh (lit., pure) Hindi primarily uses loanwords from Sanskrit to replace not only English loanwords, but also loanwords from Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
and Arabic which had been nativized for centuries. These words are called tatsam
Tatsama
Tatsama are Sanskrit loanwords in modern Indic languages like Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Sinhala and Central Dravidian language Telugu. They belong to a higher and more erudite register than common words. That register can be compared to the use of words of Greek origin in English Tatsama...
words, and they even replaced many tadbhav words, i.e. words with Sanskrit origin but having undergone profound phonological changes. The H variety was chiefly (though not exclusively) propounded by the Hindu nationalists (see Hindutva
Hindutva
Hindutva is the term used to describe movements advocating Hindu nationalism. Members of the movement are called Hindutvavādis.In India, an umbrella organization called the Sangh Parivar champions the concept of Hindutva...
) who frowned upon Persian and Arabic vocabulary because it came from Muslim cultures.
An example is the Hindi version of the sentence: "This morning I read the newspaper but could not study those books."
| Shuddh Hindi | āj | prātaḥ | maĩne | samāchār-patr(a) | paḍhā, | parantu | un | pustakõ | kā | adhyayan | nahĩ | kar | sakā. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hindustani | āj | subah | maĩne | akhbār | paḍhā, | lekin | un | kitābõ | kī | paḍhāī | nahĩ | kar | sakā. |
| Gloss | today | morning | I-erg | newspaper | read.Perfective | but | those | books | of | study | not | do | could.Perfective |
Here, prātaḥ, samāchār-patr(a) and parantu are loanwords from Sanskrit used in the H form, versus the Arabic loanwords subah, akhbār and lekin which are rather more popular in speech. Adhyayan is loanwords from Sanskrit which can even replace native tadhbhav word paḍhāī (which in turn is derived from Sanskrit paṭhana after phonological changes). Sanskrit morpho-phonemics is more complex than native Hindustani one, and hence many encounter difficulty in pronouncing phoneme clusters such as word-initial /pr/, word final /t̪r/ and word-middle /d̪ʱj/ as seen in the example above. On the other hand, the H form has highly minimized the use of Persian and Arabic phonemes /z/, /f/, /x/, /ɣ/ and /q/. Partly because they are written in the Hindi alphabet (devanagari
Devanagari
Devanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
, strictly speaking an alpha-syllabary) as a dot beneath traditionally existing alphabets (ज़, फ़, ख़, ग़, क़ ), and the dot is omitted in casual writing, many Hindi speakers mistake them for the Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
phonemes /dʒ/, /pʰ/, /kʰ/, /ɡ/ and /k/.
The L variety is used in common speech, TV serials and Bollywood movies and songs. The H variety is used in official and government writings, scholarly books and magazines, signboards, public announcements and public speaking.
Italy
Throughout most of Italy, diglossia between Italian as H and local indigenous languages – for the most part Romance – as L has long been the normal situation. The local Romance languages, somewhat ambiguously referred to as dialetti 'dialects', are direct descendants of Latin, and until relatively recently were the first languages of most Italians. Today their use is receding, but especially in smaller towns and villages it is still common for natives to use the local variety as home language and amongst themselves, and use Italian with outsiders or in formal situations.A similar situation is registered in areas in which a non-Romance languages are spoken in addition to Italian. Some non-Romance linguistic communities have been recognized by the State since the end of World War II, such as the German speakers in South Tyrol
South Tyrol
South Tyrol , also known by its Italian name Alto Adige, is an autonomous province in northern Italy. It is one of the two autonomous provinces that make up the autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. The province has an area of and a total population of more than 500,000 inhabitants...
and Slovene speakers in the provinces of Trieste
Province of Trieste
The Province of Trieste is a province in the autonomous Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy. Its capital is the city of Trieste.It has an area of 212 km², and a total population of 236,520...
and Gorizia
Province of Gorizia
The Province of Gorizia is a province in the autonomous Friuli–Venezia Giulia region of Italy.-Overview:Its capital is the city of Gorizia. It belonged to the Province of Udine between 1924 and 1927 and the communes of Sonzia, Plezzo, Bergogna, Caporetto, Tolmino, Circhina, Santa Lucia d'Isonzo,...
. In these cases, most members of the minorities are fluent in both their native language and standard Italian, resulting in a situation of bilingualism rather than diglossy. In most other cases, there is a diglossic situation between Italian as H, and the non-Romance minority languages as L. Examples include: Molise Croats
Molise Croats
Molise Croats live in the Molise region of Italy in the villages Acquaviva Collecroce , San Felice del Molise , Montemitro and elsewhere. In these three villages they are a majority. There are about 5,000 speakers of the Molise Croatian dialect...
, the Arabesh communities in southern Italy, Slovene speakers in Friulian Slovenia, the Resian dialect
Resian dialect
The Resian dialect is a distinct dialect of Slovene spoken in the Resia Valley, Province of Udine, Italy, close to the border with Slovenia...
in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and Alemannic German
Alemannic German
Alemannic is a group of dialects of the Upper German branch of the Germanic language family. It is spoken by approximately ten million people in six countries: Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, France and Italy...
speakers in Valle d'Aosta.
An interesting situation occurs in Valle d'Aosta, where the majority of the population is bilingual French-Italian, but live in a diglossic situation in regards to Franco-Provençal
Franco-Provençal language
Franco-Provençal , Arpitan, or Romand is a Romance language with several distinct dialects that form a linguistic sub-group separate from Langue d'Oïl and Langue d'Oc. The name Franco-Provençal was given to the language by G.I...
.
Jamaica
In much of Jamaica, most people speak Jamaican Patois, which is the low variety and Jamaican Standard English, the high variety. Outside of Kingston, most people use Jamaican Patois while in Kingston most traditional middle-class and high-class speak Standard English. Recently, Jamaican Patois has gone through a process of decreolizationDecreolization
Decreolization is a hypothetical phenomenon whereby over time a creole language reconverges with one of the standard languages from which it originally derived...
, similar to what happened with AAVE due to the low creole variety developed alongside with the high standard variety. If AAVE is not considered a creole language, then Jamaican Patois is the creole most closest to Standard English to the point were a conversation might hold up. Jamaican Patois has a written form, but because of the lack of standardization of the language many words can be spelled in many different ways. Occasionally Jamaican Patois is used in school.
Leonese and Mirandese
Leonese languageLeonese language
The Leonese language is the endonym term used to refer to all vernacular Romance dialects of the Astur-Leonese linguistic group in the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora; Astur-Leonese also includes the dialects...
is a minority language in Spain and Portugal, affected by diglossia in both territories. Leonese language has been recognized in the Autonomy Statute of Castile and León
Castile and León
Castile and León is an autonomous community in north-western Spain. It was so constituted in 1983 and it comprises the historical regions of León and Old Castile...
(Spain) but is not an official language. Leonese minorities in Portugal have no official recognition, and Mirandese was recognized officially by the Portuguese Parliament in 1999. In the case of the Leonese language, Leonese is used by a minority of people, and Spanish or Portuguese the majority. So Leonese language can be used just at home and between parents and relatives, while at work or in public Leonese regional Spanish is the widely used language. Leonese language only recognised in 2007. 16 schools offer the possibility of learning Leonese language as an out-school activity for children from 10 to 12 years old.
Maltese
MaltaMalta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...
is officially a bilingual country: both Maltese
Maltese language
Maltese is the national language of Malta, and a co-official language of the country alongside English,while also serving as an official language of the European Union, the only Semitic language so distinguished. Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic...
and English are official languages. Maltese is a Semitic language with extensive Italian influence.
Maltese society has been traditionally quite strongly divided, politically, between the working class and middle and upper classes and this is reflected in their language use. Although all Maltese can speak their native language, the extent to which one uses and is able to speak English often reflects one's background. This is most clearly illustrated by the different newspapers in Malta: the liberal/conservative ones are in English (with names like the Times of Malta and Malta Independent) and the more left-leaning ones are in Maltese. Maltese people of a middle- and upper-class background will often speak English or use code-switching
Code-switching
In linguistics, code-switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals—people who speak more than one language—sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other...
extensively in public. There have been warnings from several quarters including a linguistics professor from the University of Malta
University of Malta
The University of Malta is the highest educational institution in Malta Europe and is one of the most respected universities in Europe. The University offers undergraduate Bachelor's Degrees, postgraduate Master's Degrees and postgraduate Doctorates .-History:The University of Malta was founded in...
that the Maltese language could become endangered if the government (currently the right of centre Nationalists) does not do more to promote it, in the same way that English displaced Welsh
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
in Wales.
Before 1934, Italian was the official language of Malta. Those in higher class positions spoke Italian, and were often associated with the Italian irredenta movement, which promoted the unification of Malta with Italy. It was only those of lower class at the time, whose ancestors came from Sicily
Sicily
Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...
too long ago for them to still be fluent in Italian, who spoke Maltese. Today, the influence of the Italian language is still very present in Malta. Not only is it used in the professional workplace but also it is key to Malta's media, such as television, radio and publications.
Paraguay
In ParaguayParaguay
Paraguay , officially the Republic of Paraguay , is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to the east and northeast, and Bolivia to the northwest. Paraguay lies on both banks of the Paraguay River, which runs through the center of the...
, both modern-day Spanish and Guaraní
Guaraní language
Guaraní, specifically the primary variety known as Paraguayan Guaraní , is an indigenous language of South America that belongs to the Tupí–Guaraní subfamily of the Tupian languages. It is one of the official languages of Paraguay , where it is spoken by the majority of the population, and half of...
indigenous language are spoken, and both are official and taught in schools. But great part of the population speak an informal, barely codified variant of the latter, with many Spanish influences, called Jopará
Jopará
Jopará The majority of Paraguayans, particularly younger ones, speak some form of jopará.Since 1992, under the Paraguay's Ministry of Education and Culture Act, Guaraní in its "pure form" — different from the day-to-day speech of jopará — has been taught in schools...
.
Before the partitions
PolishPolish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, with respect to the upper class of the Polish society within the Kingdom of Poland, most especially landed nobility, was a low language until Jan Kochanowski
Jan Kochanowski
Jan Kochanowski was a Polish Renaissance poet who established poetic patterns that would become integral to Polish literary language.He is commonly regarded as the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz, and the greatest Slavic poet, prior to the 19th century.-Life:Kochanowski was born at...
stopped writing in Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, the high language of the time, and decided to use his own native Polish as the literary language during the late sixteenth century. Polish, however, was often, but not always, the high language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
Grand Duchy of Lithuania
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a European state from the 12th /13th century until 1569 and then as a constituent part of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1791 when Constitution of May 3, 1791 abolished it in favor of unitary state. It was founded by the Lithuanians, one of the polytheistic...
in spite of the early Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
being the official language.
Between World War I and World War II
Before World War II, the Polish intelligentsiaIntelligentsia
The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...
and those trying to emulate them, over-pronounced the words with hard "h" such as "" ("hook" in Polish) to know when to spell a word with "h", and when to spell the soft "h" sound with "ch" as in "" ("bread" in Polish). An example of a person using this method to spell properly is Jerzy Petersburski
Jerzy Petersburski
Jerzy Petersburski was a Polish pianist and composer of popular music, renowned mostly for his Tangos, some of which were milestones in popularization of the musical genre in Poland and are still widely known today, more than half a century after their creation.Jerzy Petersburski was born April...
.
Portuguese
According to some contemporary Brazilian linguists (Bortoni, Kato, Mattos e Silva, Perini and most recently, with great impact, Bagno), Brazilian Portuguese may be a highly diglossic language. This theory claims that there is an L-variant (termed "Brazilian Vernacular"), which would be the mother tongue of all Brazilians, and an H-variant (standard Brazilian Portuguese) acquired through schooling. L-variant represents a simplified form of the language (in terms of grammar, but not of phonetics) that could have evolved from 16th century Portuguese, influenced by other European, Amerindian (mostly TupianTupian languages
The Tupi or Tupian language family comprises some 70 languages spoken in South America, of which the best known are Tupi proper and Guarani.-History, members and classification:...
) and African languages, while H-variant would be based on 19th century European Portuguese
European Portuguese
European Portuguese refers to the variety of Portuguese spoken in continental Portugal, as well as the Azores and Madeira islands...
(and very similar to Standard European Portuguese, with only minor differences in spelling and grammar usage). Mário A. Perini, a Brazilian linguist, even compares the depth of the differences between L- and H- variants of Brazilian Portuguese with those between Standard Spanish and Standard Portuguese. Milton M. Azevedo wrote a chapter on diglossia in his monography: Portuguese language (A linguistic introduction), published by Cambridge University Press, in 2005, parts of which are available freely on Google books.
Russian
Russian, the language spoken in Russia, was the low language from the Middle AgesMiddle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
till the Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
period while Church Slavonic served for all official purposes.
| Russian word | Slavonic word | Russian term |
|---|---|---|
| (voice) | (vowel) | |
| (milk), (feed) | , | (mammals) |
Pakistan
In Pakistan there is a diglossia between the extremely PersianisedPersian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
/ Arabicized Urdu (used by the literary elite such as poets, writers, and Government officials), and a colloquial Urdu that is very similar to colloquial Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
(spoken by common people, and known as Hindustani
Hindustani language
Hindi-Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language and the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan. It is also known as Hindustani , and historically, as Hindavi or Rekhta...
among linguists). Colloquial Pakistani Urdu is also highly influenced by Punjabi
Punjabi language
Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by inhabitants of the historical Punjab region . For Sikhs, the Punjabi language stands as the official language in which all ceremonies take place. In Pakistan, Punjabi is the most widely spoken language...
. As English is the official language of Pakistan, there is a degree of diglossia between the upper and middle and lower classes. The upper and upper-middle classes tend to be educated in English medium schools whereas the lower class are schooled in either Urdu or one of the regional languages (usually Pashto or Sindhi
Sindhi language
Sindhi is the language of the Sindh region of Pakistan that is spoken by the Sindhi people. In India, it is among 22 constitutionally recognized languages, where Sindhis are a sizeable minority. It is spoken by 53,410,910 people in Pakistan, according to the national government's Statistics Division...
). The language of the bureaucracy and the higher courts is English, but there is a high degree of code switching between Urdu, English and regional languages in the parliament, provincial legislatures and private sector.
Riau Islands
Chinese community in Riau Islands commonly speaks more than one Chinese dialect, such as Mandarin, Teochew, Hokkian and Hakka, along with MalayMalay language
Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...
and English.
Sinhala
Sinhala (also known as Sinhalese), spoken in Sri Lanka, is a diglossic language. There are several differences between the literary languageLiterary language
A literary language is a register of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary forms is more marked in some languages than in others...
(also known as Literary Sinhala, LS) and the spoken language
Spoken language
Spoken language is a form of human communication in which words derived from a large vocabulary together with a diverse variety of names are uttered through or with the mouth. All words are made up from a limited set of vowels and consonants. The spoken words they make are stringed into...
(Spoken Sinhala, SS), especially about verbs:
- different personal pronouns:
- "he, she": LS ohu, æja; SS eja (lit. "that one", common);
- lack of inflection of the verb in SS:
- "I do", "you (sing.) do": LS mamə kərəmi, obə kərəi (inflected); SS mamə kərənəʋa, obə kərənəʋa (not-inflected, the same form for all persons)
- lack of future tense in SS, substituted by present tense plus optional temporal adverb:
- LS mamə jannəmi "I will go"; SS heʈə mamə janəʋa "tomorrow I will go" (lit. "tomorrow I go");
- different verbal forms (e.g. present participle in LS versus reduplicated form in SS);
- different adpositionAdpositionPrepositions are a grammatically distinct class of words whose most central members characteristically express spatial relations or serve to mark various syntactic functions and semantic roles...
s:- "with": LS saməⁿɡə; SS ekːa
- "from" (temporal): LS siʈə; SS iⁿdəla
- "before" : LS perə; SS isːelːa, isːəra
- different vocabulary, e.g.:
- "to help": LS upəkaːrə kərənəʋa; SS udau kərənəʋa
- "to touch": LS sparʃəjə kərənəʋa; SS allənəʋa
- "to marry": LS ʋiʋahə ʋenəʋa; SS kasaːdə baⁿdinəʋa
- "to study": LS adːjənəjə kərənəʋa; SS paːɖəm kərənəʋa
- "to fight": LS saʈən kərənəʋa; SS ranɖu kərənəʋa
Literary or written Sinhala is commonly understood, and used in literary texts and formal occasions (public speeches, TV and radio news broadcasts, etc.), whereas the spoken language is used as the language of communication in everyday life. Children are taught the written language at school almost like a foreign language.
Singapore English
Many analysts regard the use of English in Singapore as diglossic, with Singapore Standard English (SStdE) forming the H variety and Singapore Colloquial English (SCE, also known as 'SinglishSinglish
Colloquial Singaporean English, also known as Singlish, is an English-based creole language spoken in Singapore.Singlish is commonly regarded with low prestige in Singapore. The Singaporean government and many Singaporeans alike heavily discourage the use of Singlish in favour of Standard English...
') constituting the L variety. SStdE is similar to other varieties of Standard English
Standard English
Standard English refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country...
in grammar and lexis
Lexis (linguistics)
In linguistics, a lexis is the total word-stock or lexicon having items of lexical, rather than grammatical, meaning. This notion contrasts starkly with the Chomskian proposition of a “Universal Grammar” as the prime mover for language...
but with some of its own features of pronunciation, particularly the use of full vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s (rather than [ə]) in most function words and also the sporadic absence of dental fricative
Dental fricative
The dental fricative or interdental fricative is a fricative consonant pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the teeth. There are two types, both written as th in English:*Voiced dental fricative *Voiceless dental fricative...
s, while SCE is characterised by a simplified grammar (including the omission of some conjunctions and the copula verb BE) and regular use of pragmatic particles such as lah and ah, as well as frequent inclusion of Hokkien and Malay words.
However, other analysts prefer to see variation in the English spoken in Singapore along a continuum, with the style adopted depending on the education level and circumstances of the conversation. Some proficient speakers who are well-educated have been shown to use mostly SStdE but with lots of pragmatic particles when talking to their friends, and this seems to provide evidence to support the continuum analysis.
It is certainly true that speakers are able to switch quite abruptly, for example as they exit a classroom and start chatting to their friends, so one way or another there are many characteristics of diglossia in spoken Singapore English.
Switzerland
Swiss GermanSwiss German
Swiss German is any of the Alemannic dialects spoken in Switzerland and in some Alpine communities in Northern Italy. Occasionally, the Alemannic dialects spoken in other countries are grouped together with Swiss German as well, especially the dialects of Liechtenstein and Austrian Vorarlberg...
is often used as an example of diglossia. In German-speaking Switzerland, Swiss German is used in everyday conversations, as every German speaking Swiss is diglossic. Unlike Austria and Germany, where Standard German replaced the local dialect, dialects are still in much use. Swiss German is also used to a certain extent in school and church practices. Swiss Standard German
Swiss Standard German
Swiss Standard German, referred to by the Swiss as Schriftdeutsch, or Hochdeutsch, is one of four official languages in Switzerland, besides French, Italian and Romansh...
is almost entirely restricted as a written language, as spoken Swiss Standard German is only in extremely formal conversations such as news broadcasts.
Tagalog
TagalogTagalog language
Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by a third of the population of the Philippines and as a second language by most of the rest. It is the first language of the Philippine region IV and of Metro Manila...
is the language spoken in the southern part of Luzon
Luzon
Luzon is the largest island in the Philippines. It is located in the northernmost region of the archipelago, and is also the name for one of the three primary island groups in the country centered on the Island of Luzon...
, the northernmost group of islands in the Philippines. Southern Luzon covers the provinces around the capital Metro Manila, and includes the capital itself. The language spoken by majority of residents of Luzon, Tagalog, is the basis for the country's national language, Filipino
Filipino language
This move has drawn much criticism from other regional groups.In 1987, a new constitution introduced many provisions for the language.Article XIV, Section 6, omits any mention of Tagalog as the basis for Filipino, and states that:...
, which is basically the standardized form of the Tagalog spoken in Metro Manila. Tagalogs (ethnic group) originating from provinces outside of Metro Manila speak their own dialect of Tagalog. An example is of the province Batangas, which has its own dialect of Batangueño Tagalog
Batangas Tagalog
Batangas Tagalog, more properly Batangan, is a dialect of the Tagalog language spoken primarily in the province of Batangas, Philippines, as well as some parts of Quezon, Laguna, and Mindoro island. The dialect is distinctively characterized by a very strong accent and its vocabulary and grammar is...
. Speakers of Batangueño Tagalog who go to Manila often suppress their dialect and accent, eventually learning to use the Manila dialect. They would speak their native dialect only when they gather with others of their group. Also, having a regional accent is usually met with amusement, but it is not frowned upon. And although there are some who would maintain their accents, their use is very minimal outside their hometowns and peers. At the moment, very little is written using any other dialect of Tagalog other than that of Metro Manila.
Tamil
TamilTamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
is a diglossic language spoken in Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu is one of the 28 states of India. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu lies in the southernmost part of the Indian Peninsula and is bordered by the union territory of Pondicherry, and the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh...
, a state in southern India and Northern,Eastern Regions of Sri Lanka. The classic form of the language – called "Senthamizh" – is different from the spoken form known since ancient times as Iyatramizh.
The classic form is preferred for writing, and is also used for public speaking. While the written Tamil language is mostly standard across various Tamil-speaking regions, the spoken form of the language differs widely from the written form. The diglossic form of Tamil has held back its development as a language. Therefore, Perunchitthranar, a Tamil nationalist and others of his ilk, advocated that all Tamils speak only the pure form of the language, i.e., Senthamizh.
Tamil fiction-writers use "Senthamizh" for all descriptive writing and use "Iyatramizh" only to narrate conversations between the characters in their works. There have been exceptions to this rule. Noted novelist Kalki Krishnamurthy
Kalki Krishnamurthy
Kalki was the pen name of R. Krishnamurthy , a noted Tamil writer, film & music critic, Indian independence activist and journalist from Tamil Nadu, India.- Biography:...
once dismissed "Senthamizh" as "Kodunthamizh" (tortured Tamil) although his novels are written almost entirely in Senthamizh, both description and conversation. Even though all Tamils—no matter how educated they are—always converse in colloquial Tamil, Tamil novels used to depict educated people speaking in the classic form. Several decades ago, most Tamil movies had characters who spoke in classical Tamil.
Regional and caste differences can be distinctly heard in spoken Tamil. Tamil in the state capital Chennai (formerly Madras) is somewhat distinct from that spoken elsewhere. Due to its proximity to Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh
Andhra Pradesh , is one of the 28 states of India, situated on the southeastern coast of India. It is India's fourth largest state by area and fifth largest by population. Its capital and largest city by population is Hyderabad.The total GDP of Andhra Pradesh is $100 billion and is ranked third...
, Chennai Tamil has more Telugu
Telugu language
Telugu is a Central Dravidian language primarily spoken in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, where it is an official language. It is also spoken in the neighbouring states of Chattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa and Tamil Nadu...
loan words than the Tamil spoken in southern Tamil Nadu. Chennai Iyatramizh also often has more words of Urdu
Urdu
Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...
(or Deccani) than do varieties of Tamil from elsewhere in the state.
Throughout Tamil Nadu, there are several varieties of spoken Tamil. Tamil Brahmins speak a sort of "brahmin Tamil". The largely agrarian middle castes converse in their own dialect of Iyatramizh; this is the 'standard' spoken Tamil of today's Tamil movies and fiction. Similarly, the Scheduled Castes speak forms of Iyatramizh with clear grammatical differences from the varieties of other castes.
However, regional differences are more interesting to note. The Tamil dialects spoken by people in Northern districts of Tamil Nadu like Arcot, Chennai and Southern districts like Tirunelveli and Madurai are somewhat different from each other. The people from Kanyakumari speak entirely a different version which is a mixture of Tamil and Malayalam, but uniquely Kanyakumari. similar to Like in other parts of the world, the dialectical differences between various regions are vanishing due to the influence of mass communications. So apparently are the differences between the speech patterns of the various caste groupings in Tamil Nadu. It is important to note that all forms of spoken Tamil have always been mutually intelligible. Also see Tamil dialects for dialectical variations in Iyatramizh
Kannada
Kannada along with Sinhalese and TamilTamil people
Tamil people , also called Tamils or Tamilians, are an ethnic group native to Tamil Nadu, India and the north-eastern region of Sri Lanka. Historic and post 15th century emigrant communities are also found across the world, notably Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia, Canada,...
communities is diglossic. Translated into the school or the classroom situation, by 'being diglossic' is meant that these communities have accepted norms of linguistic excellence, the teaching of which is the purpose of the language teaching curriculum in the school. This normative variety of language is the one that people are expected to write. It is distinct from the various spoken dialects in grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
, lexis and phonology in spite of the shared features which make them mutually comprehensible to some extent. Similar situations are known in almost all language teaching activities everywhere, but, the linguistic
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
values associated with diglossia are different from the overtones of 'good usage' that all teachers of all languages attempt to inculcate in the learners.
Ukrainian
Using the Matched-Guise TestMatched-guise test
The Matched-Guise Test is a sociolinguistic experiment technique employed by a method and its most related research in two or more guises, which has been lately known as matched-guise or matched-guise model...
, Laada Bilaniuk (University of Michigan) administered surveys to 2,000 participants in Ukraine. In her article "Diglossia in Flux: Language and Ethnicity in Ukraine", Bilaniuk reports that until now, Russian has been the High language and Ukrainian
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
the Low language. However, her data shows that diglossia in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
is shifting.
With the language policy of the Ukrainian government, and the continued use of Russian in many parts of the country, there are many places (including Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
, Odessa, the Crimea
Crimea
Crimea , or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , is a sub-national unit, an autonomous republic, of Ukraine. It is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name...
, and the eastern part of the country) where people use Russian for everyday speech but Ukrainian for official purposes and street signs. Consequently, Russian is now the Low language and Ukrainian the High, which is a reversal from their relative position before Ukraine's independence.
Ukrainian/Russian
- "Diglossia in flux: language and ethnicity in Ukraine". Texas Linguistic Forum (1993) 33:79–88.
Yavorska Galyna M. Prescriptyvna lingvistyka yak dyskurs: Mova, kultura, vlada (Prescriptive linguistics as a discourse: Language. Culture. Power). Kiev, VIPOL, 2000. 288 p.
Yavorska G. Do problemy naivnoyi linguistyky (On the problem of folk linguistics). – Lingvistychni studii. Cherkassy, 1999, #3:13–20.
Yavorska G. Dejaki osoblyvosti movnykh kontaktiv blyz'kosporidnenykh mov (do kharakterystyky ukrain's'koho puryzmu) (On contacts of closely related languages: some features of Ukrainian purism). In memoriam of K. Trofymovych. L'viv, Litopys, 1998.
Other sources for reference (by Bilaniuk)
- "The Languages of Ukraine's Orange Revolution".