The Concept Of Diglossia

Diglossia is a linguistic phenomenon that exists in many multilingual speech communities where there is a clear difference between the languages and language varieties used in the community. It is a situation in a speech community where varieties of two or more languages are used; one variety is considered the High variety or H and the other is a low variety or L. The H variety of the language would not be anybody’s mother-tongue but is instead used in formal situations, taught in schools, for writing legal documents and religious scriptures and used in sermons. The L variety of he language is reserved for informal occasions, family gatherings, communicating with friends and to conduct daily exchange of communication; in the market place,

The H variety of a language is treated as superior and considered as the real version of the language. This alleged superiority is asserted for religious or literary reasons; for example, classical Arabic, being the language of the Quran, is given special significance by speakers of Arabic. The concept of Diglossia was first presented by Charles Ferguson (1959). He developed his idea on the French diglossie. Ferguson clarified that diglossia should not be considered equivalent to the use of a standardized and non-standardized dialects of a language in a speech community because the users of these varieties may switch to the non-standardized version in a formal occasion and to the standardized variety in an informal situation. Diglossia then is a unique situation because in this case both varieties serve a specific function and one is never used in place of the other. Initially, Ferguson focused on four examples (Arabic, Modern Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole), in all these examples there is a superposed language variety in addition to the main dialects of the

Originally it was meant to differentiate between pairs of language varieties which have a structural and functional relationship but over time the definition has evolved. In 1967, Fishman stated that any situation where language varieties can be distinguished based on function can be considered diglossic. The changes were mainly due to the fact that Ferguson’s definition of diglossia restricted the types of language varieties used whereas, Fishman expanded the description. His definition focused on a High-Low distinction in which the H variety has the following