Haitian Creole

"Language ideologies are never about language alone"

This is a quote from Susanne Stadlbauer's article on the "Arabic diglossic environment", which discusses the power relations within the languages spoken in Egypt. Here only two parts of the text are posted. To see the full text, access the link of the bottom of the post.

Language Ideologies in the Arabic Diglossia of Egypt

Susanne Stadlbauer

University of Colorado at Boulder

This paper surveys studies on language ideologies in the Arabic diglossic environment of

present-day Egypt. Specifically, it discusses linguistic and cultural implications of language

ideologies associated with Classical Arabic (CA), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA),

Egyptian Arabic (EA), and English in the Cairo area. The language ideologies of these

varieties are a product of both the past and the present: they emerged during British

colonialism in the late nineteenth century and are maintained in the postcolonial climate

through discourses on the purity of Classical Arabic, on the linguistic corruption of the

dialects, and on the increasing use of English as a symbol of Western capitalism and

modernity. Aligning with Woolard’s (1998) definition of language ideology as a mediating

link between linguistic features and social processes, this study demonstrates how language

ideologies are communicated in structural aspects of the language varieties in the Arabic

diglossia and how Egyptians use language varieties strategically to access the symbolic

power of these ideologies. It argues that studies of language ideologies, language features,

and discursive interaction are inseparable in uncovering how language is used in the Arabic

diglossia in Egypt.

1. Introduction

Studies on language ideologies and language-related historical studies on

nationalism in Egypt demonstrate that “the equation of language and nation is not

a natural fact but rather a historical, ideological construct” (Woolard 1998:16).

Language ideologies are social constructs that are illuminated through a microanalysis of linguistic structures in discourse and a macro-analysis of the factors

that lead to asymmetries in how languages are perceived. In line with Woolard, I

emphasize the analysis of language ideologies within the linguistic practices of

specific cultural settings, which means that language ideologies cannot have a

single interpretation. They are in dialectical relation with social, discursive, and

linguistic practices and often determine “which linguistic features get selected for

cultural attention and for social marking, that is, which ones are important and

which ones are not” (Schieffelin & Doucet 1998:285). In short, language

ideologies are never about language alone, but rather,

envision and enact ties of language to identity, to aesthetics, to morality, and to

epistemology. Through such linkages, they underpin not only linguistic form and

use but also the very notion of the person and the social group, as well as such Colorado Research in Linguistics, Volume 22 (2010)

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fundamental social institutions as religious ritual, child socialization, gender

relations, the nation-state, schooling, and law (Woolard 1998:3).

Taking these definitions as a conceptual blueprint, this study shows how these

linkages play out in a specific linguistic and cultural setting: Arabic diglossia in

Egypt.

Present-day language ideologies in Egypt find their beginnings in British

colonization from 1882 to 1922 (Mitchell 1988, Suleiman 2003, amongst many).

In this period, the colonizers restructured Egyptian society according to Western

ideals of modernity and economic progress. Among other projects, they initiated

anti-Arabic, pro-English language policies that assigned symbolic value to these

languages: Arabic was depreciated because it was perceived as chaotic and

random, while English was projected as being modern, prestigious, and desirable.

According to Mitchell (1988), language was one of the most far-reaching

strategies of the colonizers to change Egyptian culture. He cites al-Marsafi’s

(1881) Eight Words, a book concerning the controversy of eight particularly

powerful words that penetrated Egyptian social and political life during British

occupation: “nation”, “homeland”, “government”, “justice”, “oppression”,

“politics”, “liberty”, and “education” (Mitchell 1988:131). These terms were the

new vocabulary of modern nationalism, and their perceived misunderstanding and

misuse created a national crisis: the Western values inherent in these eight words

clashed with the cultural background of the Egyptians.

The impact of the colonizers on language and social identity was a

breakdown of local culture (Said 1975, 1979; Abuhamida 1988; Mitchell 1988).

Said’s (1975, 1979) controversial research on Orientalism sharply criticizes

Western Orientalists for perpetrating this linguistic imperialism and rendering the

Arabic language chaotic and random. Said points to textual biases in literature

about the Orient. He claims, for instance, that Arabs are metaphorically associated

with hot-blooded sexual prowess (416), while institutionally or culturally “they

are nil, or next to nil” (416). The use of sexual metaphor to describe male and

female Arabs was the Orientalists’ way of “dealing with the great variety and

potency of Arab diversity, whose source is if not intellectual and social then

sexual and biological” (416).

These ideological forces gave rise to linguistic conflicts in post-colonial Egypt:

the desires for historical and linguistic nostalgia on one hand, and for

modernization of language and society on the other. Religious conservatives,

fueled with anti-Western sentiments and historical nostalgia, argue for a

superiority of CA, and its purity is strongly anchored in Muslim Arab history,

morality, and nationalism (Suleiman 2003, 2004; Haeri 2003). They relate

“authentic” Egyptian identity to Islamic laws and values that are uncorrupted by

the West (Suleiman 2003, 2004; Haeri 2003). This causes the religious

conservatives to fight to keep CA undiluted with foreign borrowings. Suleiman

(2004) points to military warfare metaphors in their Arabic rhetoric, such as

“language regiment”, “defense of the national language”, and “enemies of Islam” Language Ideologies in the Arabic Diglossia of Egypt

3

(50), while they are projected as “holy warriors”, “garrisoned troops”, and

“patrons” of Classical Arabic (49). Any modernization of CA is lahn “linguistic

corruption”, hadm wa-takhrib “sabotage”, or ghazw “invasion”, aimed at

destroying the Qur’an and the hadith “the Prophetic Traditions” (50).

In contrast, pan-Arab nationalists propose a united Arabic language – MSA

- to be the unifying force of all Arabic-speaking people in the Arab world.

(Abuhamida 1988; Suleiman 2003; Haeri 2003; amongst many). These idealistic

nationalists argue for a written language that is mutually comprehensible in all

Arab nations and unifies the Arab world. One proponent of this view is the

Egyptian government, which has been controlling the modernization of CA by

overseeing institutions of learning, publishing, and social affairs since the middle

of the nineteenth century (Haeri 2003; Van Mol 2003). The government is mainly

concerned with “revitalizing” CA as a means of achieving social, economic, and

political progress for Egypt. According to Haeri (2003), state officials, Egyptian

intellectuals, educators, and high bureaucrats regard CA as too literary, flowery,

and lacking in modern vocabulary needed for science and technology on a global

scale.

Nevertheless, many voices point to the predicament that Egyptian Arabic,

the vernacular, is ignored in writing and education, even though it is the mother

tongue of Egyptians and the lingua franca used in face-to-face interaction. In this

view, Egyptian Arabic cannot be divorced from the identity of Egyptian people and

their local and national culture. Linguistic regionalists, mainly Arab and non-Arab

writers, are calling for the consolidation of spoken varieties at the expense of the

standard variety (Abuhamida 1988:42). According to Abuhamida (1988), this call

for linguistic regionalism coincides with political regionalism.

Lastly, proponents of a modern cultural and linguistic landscape in Egypt

advocate increasing use of English in many social domains in order to connect to

the international community. Their argument is that English has always been

present in the postcolonial period. Schaub (2000) states that “after a return to

Arabic and Egyptian nationalism during the Nasser period in the 1950s and 1960s,

the situation again changed towards favoring English after the 1973 October War

against Israel” (228). He also explains that during the Sadat years (1970-81),

Egyptian university students turned increasingly towards the United States. From

1974 on, “the U.S. Agency for Internal Development has offered assistance to

Egypt in the training of public school teachers in English language instruction”

(228). English in Egypt is strategically used by the government and the media to

achieve economic progress and to strengthen political and economic ties with the

West.

In sum, the interference of ‘modern’ Western thought in colonial and

postcolonial Egypt acts as a powerful organizing force for present-day language

ideologies: the devaluation of the local dialects as a result of both pan-Arab

nationalism and religious conservatism; an elevation of CA to a carrier of

tradition and religious morals; the authority of MSA as a contemporary standard

variety able to reflect scientific and economic progress; and the use of English as Colorado Research in Linguistics, Volume 22 (2010)

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symbolic capital linking Egypt to the “prosperity” of the West. Proponents of

each position use essentialized cultural differences between the East and the West

as their logic and strategy to construct social action, morality, nationalism, and the

“right” interpretation of language.

In this highly contested, politicized language conflict over the “best”

language variety, it is relevant to ask “which linguistic features are seized on, and

through what semiotic processes they are interpreted as representing the

collectivity” (Woolard 1998:18). These topics are explored in section two, which

uses linguistic and sociolinguistic research to provide a description of CA, MSA,

and Egyptian Arabic (EA) in the Arabic diglossia in Egypt and to show how

language ideologies are linked to the linguistic structures of these language

varieties. Section three demonstrates how language ideologies are ranked, play a

structuring role in every-day interaction, and shape a variety of communicative

strategies. Speakers use the shared historical, cultural, and linguistic background

associated with varieties as an interactional resource in discourse. This dialectic

aspect of ideology shows that “simply using language in particular ways is not

what forms social groups, identities, or relations…; rather, ideological

interpretations of such uses of language always mediate these effects” (Woolard

1998:18). In such interactional uses speakers take advantage of the social, moral,

and political attributes of each variety, which leaves a picture of dynamic

reinterpretation of language use in Egypt. The effects of these communicative

strategies range from showing solidarity with the pan-Arab nationalist ideology to

transgressing social and geographic boundaries by tapping into Western

communicative styles.

2. Arabic Diglossia

According to Eisele (2002), dialect geography represented the most

dominant form of linguistic analysis of Arabic until the 1950’s (12). However,

Ferguson’s (1959) introduction of diglossia to the Arabic sociolinguistic

landscape “helped to crystallize modernist notions about this phenomenon and set

the agenda for subsequent studies” (Eisele 2002:12). Ferguson (1959, 1996)

conducted an extensive analysis of Arabic diglossia. Ferguson defines diglossia as

a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects

of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a

very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed

variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an

earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by

formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is

not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation (Ferguson

1996:34-35).

Ferguson claims that in Arabic diglossia, CA is the divergent, highly codified, and

superposed variety. It is seen as superior to vernaculars, such as EA, due to Language Ideologies in the Arabic Diglossia of Egypt

5

widespread prejudices against vernaculars within the language community

1

. In

line with Ferguson (1996), this paper will use “H” for a high prestige language,

such as CA or MSA, and “L” for the low prestige dialects, such as EA.

2.1 H and L

In diglossic situations, there is usually a belief that H is more beautiful,

more logical, and more sophisticated (Ferguson 1996; Van Mol 2003). This is true

for Arabic diglossia. According to Haeri (2003), CA is often perceived as a

“language whose aesthetic and musical qualities move its listeners, creating

feelings of spirituality, nostalgia and community” (43). CA “socializes people into

rituals of Islam, affirms their identity as Muslims and connects them to the realm

of purity, morality, and God” (Haeri 2003:43) and attributes of the language are

often translated to the moral virtues of the user.

CA also attained high prestige due to its rich literary tradition (Ferguson

1996; Van Moll 2003, amongst many). There is a “sizable body of written

literature which is held in high esteem by the speech community” (Ferguson

1996:29-30). In contrast to EA, the orthography of CA is well established and

“has a long tradition of grammatical study and a fixed norm for pronunciation,

grammar and lexicon” (Van Mol 2003: 43). The fixed norms of CA were

established as early as the ninth century, when CA was codified and, as the

language of the Qur’an, has been one of the major areas of study of Muslims

scholars ever since (Parkinson 1991; Van Mol 2003). Scholars have produced

grammars, dictionaries, pronunciation manuals, and stylistic conventions that

restrict variation and protect CA from the influence of modernity. This recalls

Woolard’s (1998:17) observation that “written form, lexical elaboration, rules for

word formation, and historical derivation all may be seized on in diagnosing ‘real

language’ and ranking the candidates” (17).

Somewhat contradictorily, Haeri’s (2003) research also shows that many

Egyptians judge the spoken vernacular, EA, as the more beautiful variety, even

for writing literature. She claims that “ordinary people describe it [EA] as easy,

light, full of humor and more beautiful than other Arabic dialects, as a habit and

as the language of Egyptians” (37). EA, or al-‘amiyyah “the common” is the

mother tongue used for every-day communication in Egypt and serves as a marker

of Egyptian identity and national culture (Haeri 2003:37). Nevertheless, EA is

not generally recognized by religious scholars or pan-Arab nationalists as a

language of writing; since it has layers of lexical borrowings from Coptic,

Turkish, Persian, Greek, Italian, French, and English, it is criticized as

“permissive”, “promiscuous”, or “weak” (38). Furthermore, it is perceived as the

1

It is important to note, however, that not all Egyptian dialects are valued

equally. Urban dialects, such as Cairene Arabic spoken in the city of Cairo,

usually have a higher prestige than rural dialects. Colorado Research in Linguistics, Volume 22 (2010)

6

language of the ordinary Egyptians on the streets, and the image of an EA speaker

is that of a common or backward man (Haeri 2003).

This argument, however, is not sound since the extent of foreign

borrowings into CA and their acceptability or naturalization is obscurred by the

large timeframe in which it happened and “by the degree to which foreign

elements have extended to be assimilated to the root-pattern system of the

morphology and also by the organizing principles of Arabic dictionaries, whereby

assimilated borrowings are listed under a theoretical ‘root’” (305). For instance,

the medieval borrowing di:ba:j “silk brocade” from the Persian di:ba gave rise to

the verb dabbaja “to embellish” (305). It then was reanalzed in the modern

lexicon with the trilateral root d-b-j and took on Arabic productive morphology,

which can be seen in the derivation mudabbaja:t “figures of speech” (305).

Furthermore, concurrent with colonial times, “as western political, economic, and

scientific ideas proliferated and ramified through the Arab world, transliterated

foreign words, especially in the sciences, and uncontrolled and sometimes

inaccurate loan translations began to pour into written Arabic” (308).

This discrepancy between the ideologies and actual language features

complicates the notion of the purity of CA. Ferguson (1996) states that the

communicative tensions between the H and L varieties in diglossia may be

resolved by “the use of relatively uncodified, unstable, intermediate forms of the

language” (31). MSA is the most common intermediate form and is perceived as a

“modern” version of CA. However, there are problems with defining MSA, to

which I turn to next.

http://www.colorado.edu/ling/CRIL/Volume22_Issue1/paper_STADLBAUER.pdf

'Conquest' Diglossia

This article is a part of the book "The Politics of English as a World Language - New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies". I believe it is worth-mentioning because of the concept the author works on - 'Conquest' Diglossia.

The 'Conquest' Diglossia he refers to would groundly differ from the one observed in Switzerland, for instance. The background of the presence of French in the Caribbean is the colonization, which didn 't take place in the European case.

The concept of “diglossia” in Caribbean creole situations

The concept of “diglossia” in Caribbean creole situations

Donald Winford (1985).

Language in Society, Volume 14,

Issue 03, September 1985 pp 345-356

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=2991788

Greece: Demotic and Katharevusa

Demotic Greek language, also called Romaic, Greek Demotiki, or Romaiki, a modern vernacular of Greece. In modern times it has been the standard spoken language and, by the 20th century, had become almost the sole language of Greek creative literature. In January 1976, by government order, it became the official language of the state, replacing Katharevusa Greek as the language for governmental and legal documents, in the courts and Parliament, in the schools, and in newspapers and other publications. (Katharevusa continued to be used in some legal documents and othertechnical writings in which there was a large body of established literature.)

Although the vocabulary, phonology, and grammar of ancient Greek remain the basis of Demotic Greek, they have been considerably modified and simplified. Foreign words and constructions that penetrated the language in large numbers reflect the influence of various foreign powers that held sway in postclassical Greece or that exerted influence there, from the foundation of the eastern Roman Empire (ad 325) through the Crusades to the Venetian and Turkish conquests. The Turkish domination, in particular, destroyed Greek literary continuity and development, and after Greece regained its independence in the early 19th century, many nationalists —wishing to meet the need for a uniform written language—developed an artificial, purified language, Katharevusa, as an approximation of the old classical norms. It was a deliberate archaization. When a military dictatorship arose in 1967, the new conservatism extended to language, and Katharevusa was strictly imposed in the schools. But after the restoration of political democracy in 1974, linguistic democracy followed suit, and Demotic—literally, the “popular” language—was given official sanction.

Today the two varieties, Demotic and Katharevusa, have merged to form a single unified language, Standard Modern Greek (Greek: Koini Neoelliniki).

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/157455/Demotic-Greek-language

Comic Strip

Diglossia : a case in Papuan Malay and Bahasa Indonesia?

When finishing the chapter 1 of Mesthrie’s “Introducing Sociolinguistics”, there is a big question in my mind about diglossia. This question comes into mind when I think about my dialect in my home country, Indonesia. I was brought up in a town in Bird’s head peninsula in West Papua, Indonesia, and when I was a child, I thought that I spoke Indonesian language. However, in fact, the language that I have spoken that merely a dialect called ‘Papuan Malay’; this term coined several years ago when there were some linguistic researches about the language spoken in my area. For your information, in West Papua area, I study the national language known as Bahasa Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia, to some extent, is known as the modern modified Malay with abundantly loanwords from Sanskrit, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Arabic, English, and other tribal languages. I have studied and learned Bahasa Indonesia since I was in primary school, while when I was at home, my family and I as well as the community around me spoke the dialect known as Papuan Malay; it has served as the lingua franca of trading in the area to communicate with tribes in West Papua since circa 17^th centuries or before the integration to Indonesia. Bahasa Indonesia, otherwise, is the language used at school, government, and any formal situation especially concerning to academic writing.

Mesthrie’s explanation about Ferguson’s Diglossia and ‘Fishman’s extension’ (Mesthrie, 2009: 39 – 40), to some extent, makes me think about my dialect and national language ‘Bahasa Indonesia’, whether Papuan Malay is simply a dialect in terms of ‘standard versus dialect’ arrangement or the  situation when the diglossia occurs? I also wonder about the possibility that one dialect, at first is just a dialect in such non-diglossic society but when there is a change in society, let’s say because of political circumstance leading to diglossia occurrence, or vice versa. Is that possible?

Regarding to the hints in the textbook, the two distinctions proposed by Ferguson about diglossia can be used to describe the situation of the dialect used in my area especially the second hint that mentions “the relationship between standard and dialect is typically a close one, and it is not always easy to draw the line between the two. Again, in contrast the H and L forms of diglossia have distinct grammars which are almost like those of different language.” (Mesthrie, 1999: 39). It is because, in the case of Papuan Malay comparing to Bahasa Indonesia, it is so easy to distinguish between the standard and dialect, for example in terms of its morpho-syntactical structure. It is really clear, let’say, when addressing question to another person as well in addressing the possession of someone.

To illustrate my questions, I would like to give two simple sentences and its literal gloss written in my dialect and in Bahasa Indonesia (both formal and informal) about the case of interrogative form and possessive pronoun. In my dialect, we cannot form any question without using double-pronoun.

Example #1.
Papuan Malay
(…*) – ko – mo – pi – kemana?       Or   (…*) ko – pi – mana?
 (…*)  – you – want – go – where?              ( …) you – go – where?

Bahasa Indonesia (formal form)
Ke mana – kau – akan/hendak – pergi?
Where – you – will – go?

Or

(…**) ke mana – kau – akan/ hendak – pergi? (…**)
(…**) Where – you – will – go

Bahasa Indonesia (informal form)
Mau – ke mana, – (kamu**)?
Want – where – (you)?

Or

Kamu – mau – (pergi***) ke mana?
You – want – where?

English
Where do you go?/ Where are you going?

Notes:
*: In my dialect, the (*) refers to any name of the addressee or socially accepted term we can use to address i.e. uncle, sister and so forth

** In this example refers to the addressee (name or socially accepted addressee term). It can be put in the initial position or in the final position.

*** In this example the words ke mana ‘where’ embedded the meaning of go.


Example #2
The possessive pronoun in use

a. Singular form

Papuan Malay
Ini – sa – pu – buku.
 This/ it – I – have – book

Bahasa Indonesia (formal form)
Ini – bukuku.
This /it – book.poss.1Sg

Or

Ini – buku – saya/ aku (informal form)
It is – book – 1^st sing.

b. Plural form

Papuan Malay
Ini – dorang/ dong – pu – buku.
 This/ it – they – have – book

Bahasa Indonesia (formal and informal)
Ini – buku – mereka.
This /it – book.poss.3^rd plural

http://ling6002.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/diglossia-a-case-in-papuan-malay-and-bahasa-indonesia/

Perspectives on Arabic Diglossia

Andrew Freeman's Perspectives on Arabic Diglossia

Dec. 9, 1996

No discussion of Arabic is complete without at least a cursory discussion of diglossia. Charles Ferguson is credited with first using the term diglossia in an article which he wrote in 1959 called Diglossia. He identified four languages, Arabic, Greek, Haitian Creole and Swiss German as being prime examples of languages which fit into his definition of diglossia. Very simply stated, he said that diglossic speech communities have a High variety that is very prestigious and a Low variety with no official status which are in complementary distribution with each other, for instance the High variety might be used for literary discourse and the Low variety for ordinary conversation. His original definition of diglossia was that the two varieties which are in a diglossic relationship with each other are closely related, and therefore diglossia is not bilingualism. In his defining examples he points out that the High variety is always an acquired form, and that some educated native speakers might even deny that they ever use the Low variety. An important component of diglossia is that the speakers have the personal perception that the High variety is the "real" language and that the Low variety is "incorrect" usage. In Arabic people talk about the High variety as being "pure" Arabic and the dialects as being corrupt forms. Since that time much has been written about diglossia. Charles Ferguson himself has commented on the weaknesses of his original article in Diglossia Revisited. (1991. The Southwest Journal Linguistics). For the most part he re-endorses his original article, but he does criticize his lack of clarity on specifying that his definition for diglossia was putative, and that the point of his original article had been to point at a phenomenon that was not well understood hoping that it would receive more attention. In the current context I feel the need to offer a coherent explanation and a proposed model for how diglossia works in Arabic. The written language was first systematically codified in the 8th century CE. The Qur'aan and the pre-Islamic poetry were the primary sources of the prescriptive standard for the written language, which has since that time been held in the highest regard by the entire Muslim community as the language of the Qur'aan and the language that the angels in heaven speak. There is some evidence that diglossia existed at that time, since this codification of the language was motivated by a desire to have recent converts to Islam learn the correct language, rather than the "corrupted" urban varieties of Baghdad and Damascus. This standard language has not changed in terms of syntax and morphology since that time. There has been a gradual shift in the lexicon so that I can't read the Sufi texts or histories from the 9th century without a special dictionary, but I can read witty entertainments or histories dating from about the 12th century on. A large body of literature has been written in this language. It is interesting to note that for a period of time Arabic was the language of scientific discourse, much like English is today. In another parallel to the current situation with English, a lot of what was written was not composed by native speakers. This codified language remains the highest standard of the language basically unchanged to this day. Conversely, the spoken language has had no official status, and the various dialects have continued to evolve since the 8th century with no attempt to form a standard.
When the split between the dialects and Literary Arabic occured is subject to debate. The prevailing view is that put forth by Ferguson in 1959 in an article entitled The Arabic KoinŽ in which he posited that all of the dialects existing outside of the Arabian peninsula had as their common source a variety spoken in the military camps at the time of the Islamic expansion in the middle of the 7th century and that this variety was already very distinct from the language of the Qur'an. In other words the dialects are not corrupt forms, but instead have had a separate existence from the Classical language for as long as they have existed outside of the Arabian peninsula.
It should also be noted that even the codified Classical Arabic has a large amount of inherent variability. Most nouns have more than one allowable broken plural. There are many synonyms for even the most common vocabulary items, and some verbs have meanings that shift drastically according to the nouns and prepositions with which they are used. One explanation for this is that the Classical language that was used for the Qur'an was a special form of the language common to all of the tribes that existed in the Arabian peninsula at the time of the prophet that had previously only been used in the traditional poetry. The age of this form is not known, but it was a conglomeration that had existed for some time and was not representative of any single dialect or any one era.
From the 15th century on, most of the Arabic speaking world was under foreign domination, either Ottoman or European. The Ottomans produced all of their official documents in Turkish and their religious documents in Arabic. The French in Algeria, between 1830 and 1962, tried to actively suppress Arabic. The British in Egypt at one point tried to make the Egyptian dialect the official language. Literary Arabic stagnated during the Ottoman and colonial period.
There are roughly four major dialect groups, a) Maghrebi (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and western Libya), b) Egyptian (eastern Libya, Egypt and the Sudan), c) Levantine (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine) and d) the Arabic of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE and Kuwait). These categories tend to ignore the split that has always existed throughout the history of Arabic between Bedouin, Rural and Urban varieties For instance the speech of a Cairene is closer to the speech of a Damascene than it is to the speech of a Bedouin dweller of Egypt, even though I have placed Damascus and Cairo into different dialect categories. There are also some dialect isolates and relic dialects in Central Asia and in the Sahara desert.
All of the dialects share features which do not exist in Classical Arabic. For Arabs they are mostly mutually intelligible with the exception that the Maghrebi dialects are generally unintelligible outside of the Maghreb. For non-Arabs who have limited exposure to the dialects the difference between dialects can be startling. Furthermore, most Arabs know how to speak in such a way so that only people from their hometown can readily understand them. The lexical variation can be problematic. "Mara" in Palestinian means wife, but in Egyptian dialect it means "loose woman". "Masha" in Palestine means "he walked", but in Morocco means "he went". The word for "sauce pan" is "qdra", "Hilla" and "Tunjara" in Rabat, Cairo and Hebron, respectively, however all three have usable Modern Standard Arabic cognates. In Egypt and the Levant "maashi" means "allright" but in Yemen and Morocco it means "no".
The academic community in the US calls the modern form of Literary/Classical Arabic "Modern Standard Arabic" or MSA for short. An American who has only studied Modern Standard Arabic will be well received but will not understand much of the spoken discourse going on around him in an Arabic speaking country. For the most part Modern Standard Arabic is not used in spontaneous speech situations. In situations where a person has a prepared text in front of him/her, and keeps his/her remarks within the framework of the prepared text there is very little regional difference between what a reasonably educated speaker would produce as Modern Standard Arabic. As the remarks stray from the prepared text, so will the remarks also stray from Modern Standard Arabic. Some interviewers on TV and the radio are very skilled at staying in MSA for an entire interview. This form of the language is remarkably similar in all parts of the Arabic speaking world (including Dearborn, Michigan). Meanwhile the interviewee who does not have these MSA skills will start negating in dialect pretty early on, and by the end of a longer remark will probably be speaking almost entirely in dialect. King Hussein of Jordan can stay in MSA for an entire interview. Arafat doesn't even try, but he will read his speeches in pretty high fuS-Ha.
Since World War II the situation has been characterized by the end of overt colonialism. Since the end of colonialism the Arab governments have initiated mass education campaigns and have done almost nothing to stem the tide of mass rural migration to urban centers. The motivation has been that they wanted to turn their territories into modern industrialized nation-states. As a result of these social changes (disruptions?), I think we can safely say that the linguistic situation has been quite fluid during this time period.
In attempt to show how the linguistic system of modern Arabic works, El-Said Muhammed Badawi of the American University of Cairo has offered us the diagram in Figure 1.

Badawi's Diagram "Levels of Egytian Arabic"

The names of the five levels, from top to bottom, translated into English mean: the Classical Language of Tradition, the Modern Classical Language, the Colloquial of the Educated, the Colloquial of the Enlightened and the Colloquial of the Illiterate. It should be noticed that in this five level model every level includes mixing from all the other elements of the system. This is different from Ferguson's description of diglossia which states that the two forms are in complementary distribution. In this picture we can see that even the speech of the illiterate contains elements of the High variety (fuS-Ha). This picture gives a pretty good idea of the speech of an individual within the system as a function of the level and type of education that s/he has received.
Another popular model is two idealized poles, as in Figure 2.

MSA is at one end and dialect at the other with a length of speech continuum in the middle. This is essentially the Badawi diagram without specifying any of the details of the intermediate steps. The problem with both of these models is that they don't show the unity of fuS-Ha across the entire expanse of space and time at the High end of the spectrum nor the atomization of the dialects by person and location at the other. Keith Walters at the University of Texas at Austin has done a lot of work with Tunisian Arabic. He describes a situation of intrasentential diglossic switching between MSA and Tunisian Arabic where because of lexiacal overlap and morphophonolgical reductions, it is often hard to seperate the MSA from the TA. This situation has also been described by Heath in Codeswitching in Moroccan Arabic. Keith Walters in more than one article has presented us with the picture shown in Figure 3 as workable model for Tunisian Arabic.

Keith Walters' diagram "System of ETA"

This picture gives us a good picture of the complexity of the system in place in Tunis. It is also, I believe, a transportable enough model for the linguistic situation in just about any other nation in the Arabic speaking world with the proviso that in the gulf and in Egypt the codeswitching is between English and Arabic and not between French and Arabic. It deserves mention that in Tunis many speakers are truly bilingual in French, having learned it in the home, but this situation is extremely rare in Egypt or the Persian Gulf region. I also must say that I am pretty dubious about any purported MSA/CA used in extemporaneous speech. These situations are pretty much limited to University lectures, TV interviews and press conferences by heads of state and even then the level of dialect use can be quite high.
Walters' diagram, like the Badawi picture, fails to show the fundamental unity of the High variety across the entire Arabic speaking world and across the entire history of the High variety. Unlike the Badawi picture, it fails to explicitly model the place of the individual within the system, i.e. not all participants can participate equally at all levels. The third weakness in this model is that it only shows the system as it exists in Tunisia. Keith Walters gives a companion diagram shown in Figure 4, that shows the system for diglossic switching and French/Arabic codeswitching in Tunisian Arabic. It also shows the influence from other Arabic dialects on MSA and ETA, as well as the influence of TA on North African French.

All four of these models are very useful in trying to understand Arabic diglossia. My claim that stills needs to be substantiated is that they all fall short of giving us the complete picture. Dr. Badawi's picture shows the elements that might be included in a single person's speech as a function of education, but it fails to model the variation that occurs as a function of location, i.e. that the caammiyya is not uniform as we move from location to location.
Now the Walters' diagrams also fails to model the spectrum of dialects as a function of location, although he is very careful to label his diagrams as being only specific to Tunisian Arabic. Additionally, these two diagrams do not attempt to show the individual's system in the same way that the Badawi diagram does. I will state again that an important fact to bear in mind is that MSA is nearly uniform throughout the Arabic speaking world, and since it is intimately linked with Classical Arabic, nearly uniform across a span of 1400 years. It is almost impossible to overstate the status of Classical Arabic in the culture of Arabic speakers. Many Arabs will state that Classical Arabic is "the real language" and that the dialects are "corrupted" or "impure" forms.
Allow me to propose a rope structure. Included in the system is everything that has ever been written that is still accessible to the average literate reader of MSA. Each such document belongs to the MSA grammar of the individual who can still access that document. The individual Arabic grammar and lexicon of everybody who claims to speak Arabic can be represented by a single strand. These strands come together on the MSA end of the scale and form a more or less cohesive rope like structure. This rope separates into 22 less cohesive smaller twine structures as we move down the rope into national dialectal varieties. As we move down the scale from more public varieties to confessional and neighborhood varieties the fraying becomes more pronounced. These most frayed ends represent peer group "in-talk" or local trade jargons and the like. Wherever a person's lexicon, syntax, morphology or phonology match another person's, we can model that as the strands touching in that location. As we move down the scale the rope becomes ever more frayed. As per Badawi's model, an individual's access to the higher end of the rope is a function of education. Owing to the Palestinian diaspora most Arabic speakers have a passive knowledge of the Palestinian dialect, and because of the Egyptian dominance of Arabic TV and cinema most Arabic speakers have a passive knowledge of the Egyptian dialect as well. Presumably no strand will have any length of its individual strand where it does not touch at least one other strand.
I see this model as combining the Badawi model with the Walters' model. Each strand can be expanded into the Badawi picture, and the Walters' model is a more complete blow-up of the system at the point where it breaks out into 22 separate systems. The rope shows the inherent point of contact between all the systems, which is the still viable MSA.

Andrew Freeman's "rope" diagram

In closing this section I want to point out that if we try to add in every national variety of Arabic to Walters' picture we end up with something very similar to the author's "rope" picture. It bears mentioning that the Egyptian dialect has some influence on the vernaculars of the entire Arabic speaking world. Conversely, the Maghrebi dialects of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are heavily stigmatized and do not exert much influence on any dialects outside of their region.
The question still remains how long can this structure remain in place before individual national strands fray off the rope completely and become their language, with their own literature. The answer to this question still seems to be that it is not likely to happen soon due to the high status that Classical Arabic has. The only variety of Arabic so far to break off and form its own language is Maltese, and most scholars agree that this happened because the Maltese are Christians and don't consider the Arabic language sacred in the same way that Muslims do.
Another phenomenon that receives attention is the so-called "Middle Arabic" or "Educated Formal Arabic", that is a very classicized version of dialect or a very colloquialized version of MSA. The debate revolves around whether this is a stable form or a set of ad hoc accommodation strategies between educated speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects or if it is merely unsuccessful attempts at speaking MSA. Is this the direction of the current language change in progress for Arabic? Are the dialects moving closer to each other and to MSA at the same time, while MSA continues to be simplified and move in the direction of the dialects? These questions are very controversial. One thing that everyone agrees upon is that the national dialects are undergoing a leveling process and that there are a lot of recent borrowings from MSA into the dialects. European languages, especially English and French, still reign supreme in the realms of Science and International Commerce in the Arab world. No doubt there is lots of opportunity for ambitious linguists to study code-switching and language contact phenomena for years to come.

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References

Baccouche, Belkacem and Azmi, Sanaa . Conversations in Modern Arabic, The Murray Printing Company, Westford, Massachusetts. (1984) Blanc, H. Communal Dialects in Baghdad, (1964.)
Blau, J. The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judeo-Arabic, (1965)
Blau, J. A Grammar of Christian Arabic, (1966)
Blau, J. 1977. The Beginnings of the Arabic Diglossia: A Study of the Origins of Neo-Arabic, Afro-Asiatic Lingiustics 4: 175-202
Cadora, F. 1970. Some Linguistic Concomitants of Contactual Factors of Urbanization, Anthropological Linguistics, 12: 10-19
Cadora, F. Bedouin, Rural and Urban Arabic: An Ecolinguistic Study, ( 1992)
Corriente, F. 1976. From Old Arabic to Classical Arabic the Pre-Islamic KoinŽ: Some Notes on the Native Grammarians' Sources, Attitudes and Goals, Journal of Semitic Studies 21: 62-98
Cowell, Mark W. A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic. Georgetown University Press. (1964)
Diem, W. 1976 Some Glimpses of the Rise and Early Development of Arabic Orthography, Orientalia 45: 251-261
DiPetro, R. and Selim, G. 1967. The Language Situation in Arab Sicily, Linguistic Studies in Memory of R. S. Harrell, pp. 19-35
Ferguson, Ch. 1959. Diglossia Word 15: 325-337
Ferguson, Ch. 1959. The Arabic Koiné, Language 35: 616-630
Ferguson, Ch. 1989. Grammatical Agreement in Classical Arabic and the Modern Dialects: A Response to Pidginization Hypothesis, Al-Arabiyya, 22: 5-18
Finlay, Hugh. Jordan & Syria, A Travel Survival Kit. Lonely Planet Publications, Inc., Berkeley, Ca. (1987)
Francis, Tim. Access to Arabic, Arabic Script Version, Nelson Filmscan. (1985)
Fromkin,Victoria and Rudman,Robert. An Intruduction to Language, 4th Ed.. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. (1988)
Hary, B. 1989. Middle Arabic: Proposals for New Terminology, Al-Arabiyya 22:19-36
Hamalainen, Pertti. Yemen, a Travel Survival Kit, Lonely Planet Publications, Inc., Berkeley, Ca. (1991)
Hourani, Albert. A History of the Arab Peoples. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. (1991)
The Information Please Almanac.1994, Houghton & Miflin(1994)
Kaye, A. 1970. Modern Standard Arabic and the Colloquials, Lingua 24: 374-412
Kimball, John C. The Arabs 1984/85, Atlas and Almanac. American Educational Trust, Washington D.C. (1984)
Merle, Robert. Ahmed Ben Bella, Walker and Co. (1967)
Mitchell, T.F. Colloquial Arabic, The Living Language of Egypt, The English Universities Press LTD. (1962)
Moscati. S. An Introduction to Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages, (1964)
Rabin, Ch. The Beginnings of Classical Arabic, Islamica 4: 19-37, 1955. (1955)
Tritton, A. S., D.Litt. Teach Yourself Arabic, David McKay Company, Inc. (no date)
Versteegh, K. Pidginization and Creolization: The Case of Arabic, ( 1984)
19. Ziadeh, F. 1986. Prosody and the Initial Formation of Classical Arabic, JAOS 106.2: 333-338
20. Zwettler, M. The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry: Its Character Implications, (1978)



http://innerbrat.org/Andyf/Articles/Diglossia/digl_96.htm

Reflections on Diglossia

Coby Lubliner

Diglossia, dialect and standard

It’s a warm Friday mid-afternoon in a village in the Peruvian Highlands, not far from Cuzco. In the main plaza, a small crowd consisting mostly of women and young children – some of elementary-school age, some pre-school – is chatting in Quechua, seemingly waiting for something to arrive. And , sure enough, something does arrive: a brightly painted school bus, which stops near the crowd and disgorges a dozen or so neatly uniformed high-school students. It’s their families who have been waiting for them. But before these older boys and girls join in the Quechua chatter with their mothers and younger siblings, they bid farewell to one another and to their schoolmates who stay on the bus to go on to the next village. They talk about plans for the weekend – soccer, movies – and for the following week. How do I know this? Because this conversation is in Spanish, not Quechua.

There are many societies where the school language (usually an official language of the state) is significantly different from the home language (often called a “dialect” or “vernacular”). Such a situation is referred to by linguists as diglossia, a term that was introduced in 1959 in a paper with that title by the linguist Charles Ferguson, “modeled,” as he wrote, “on the French diglossie, which has been applied to this situation, since there seems to be no word in regular use for this in English; other languages of Europe generally use the word for ‘bilingualism’ in this sense as well.”⁽¹⁾

Ferguson applied the term he coined to situations where the vernacular (which he called ‘low’ or L) and the formal language (called ‘high’ or H) could be regarded as, in some sense, variants of the same language; the examples he gave were those of colloquial and classical Arabic (his area of expertise), demotic and katharevousa Greek, Creole and French in Haiti, and Schwyzertütsch (Swiss-German) and German in Switzerland. In the 1960s, however, research by Joan Rubin in Paraguay showed that the relation between the linguistically unrelated Guaraní and Spanish in that country was, socially, of the same nature, and so the use of term was expanded.

I use the term ‘diglossia’ somewhat grudgingly. A few facts, which I consider important, are missing from Ferguson’s definition. One is that the French diglossie is an adaptation, introduced by the Greek-French writer Jean Psichari (Ioannis Psikharis), of the Modern Greek διγλωσσία, which simply means ‘bilingualism’, and is typically defined in Modern Greek dictionaries as ‘the use by a community of two languages or of two varieties of the same language (emphasis mine). The French philologist Auguste Dozon already commented in 1889, in reviewing Psichari’s work, that the only possible rendition of διγλωσσία would be bilinguisme, which he however characterized as a mot barbare, and which did not become current in French until the linguist Antoine Meillet used it in 1917.

Another missing fact is that ‘bilingualism’ was in fact used “in this sense as well” in English, as Ferguson would have discovered by consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, where he would have found citations to this effect from the 1940s and 1950s; the latest edition of the OED shows that the term was so used in the 1960s as well.

And then there is the fact that when English words are modeled on French words ending in -ie which in turn derive from Greek words ending in -ία or -εία, then, with extremely few exceptions, the English ending becomes -y (monarchy, therapy, theology, philosophy, and so on ad infinitum), unless the word describes a specific medical condition, in which case the Latin-like ending -ia is adopted (anemia, neuralgia, myasthenia, etc.); English even has the doublet melancholy/melancholia. The only exceptions that come to mind are ‘mania’ (along with its compounds) and ‘nostalgia’, both of which have medical analogues (and, of course, ‘many’ would not have worked). An unusual case is that of ‘anomie,’ where the French ending has been kept.

In fact, in 1959 the word ‘diglossia’ was present in unabridged dictionaries (such as Webster’s Third International) with ‘condition of the tongue being bifid’ as its only meaning, while the linguistic term ‘diglossy’ was being used at least by linguists specializing in Greek, for example P. C. Costas,⁽²⁾ and continued to be so used after the publication of Ferguson’s paper, for example by Robert Browning.⁽³⁾ It is only in dictionaries published in 2000 or later that the sociolinguistic meaning of ‘diglossia’ can be found.

So much for the word itself. Its choice shows, if nothing else, that even an outstanding linguist can be insensitive to the nuances of his native language.

One point that Ferguson insisted on was a distinction between diglossia as he defined it and the more common “dialect-standard” dichotomy, the difference being that while in the latter situation there are people who actually speak “standard” (as Ferguson no doubt thought of himself as doing), under diglossia no one speaks H colloquially. But I have been told by a Greek friend about an uncle of hers, a priest, for whom katharevousa was the natural medium of expression. And I firmly believe that no one really speaks “standard” as taught in school, with all the grammatical and syntactic rules that one is expected to follow in expository writing. People who think that they speak standard (“incorrectly,” they often believe) actually speak a dialect that is a colloquial, regionally colored variant thereof; I will call such a dialect, for lack of a better term, a parastandard (I would welcome suggestions for a better term). In German it is referred to as Umgangssprache; Italians, French and others speak of italiano regionale, français régional, and the like. In any parastandard there are, of course, degrees by which any idiolect differs from the standard; people who read a lot – academics, for example – are more likely to have their natural speech influenced by the written language. But, as the Israeli linguist Menachem Dagut⁽⁴⁾ has written, “[e]very living language displays a greater or lesser degree of diglossia between its spoken and written use.”

Another characteristic of diglossia that Ferguson considered essential was stability. I don’t consider the fact that katharevousa has virtually vanished in Greece a refutation of this assumption; it is rather an illustration of Ferguson’s misinterpretation of the Greek situation, where the polarization between katharevousa and demotic has always been more of a political right-left opposition than a high-low prestige relation. In fact, Ferguson’s characterization of H as being more codified than L was belied by Greek, because a written norm for demotic evolved naturally on the basis of the speech of Athens, while there were – as the poet Cavafis is reported to have said – “a thousand katharevousas.”

It is my observation – typified by the Peruvian scene depicted at the beginning – that diglossia (in the more general sense) typically remains stable in a society as long as most of its children undergo only minimal schooling, limited to a few years of teaching the three Rs; the “dialect” is then likely to persist as the main vehicle of ordinary conversation in the community. But when a significant segment of youth of both sexes attends school well into adolescence, there is a fairly general tendency for a parastandard based on the school language to become the medium of peer conversation, and, after a greater or lesser number of generations, to displace the dialect altogether. The process is of course accelerated if the authorities discourage or suppress the use of the dialect at school, even during recess; this is how, in the course of the twentieth century, most of the regional dialects and patois died out in France, and how (Cajun) French was lost in Southwest Louisiana. Similar cases abound all over the world.

It takes strong counterpressure to oppose this tendency. One example is German Switzerland, where colloquial use of Swiss-German is maintained at all social levels as a kind of symbol of Swiss identity. Similarly, it’s Paraguayan nationalism that keeps even the educated classes of Paraguay speaking Guaraní alongside Spanish.

In the last third of the twentieth century the promotion of linguistic diversity and the preservation of threatened linguistic species became causes associated with left-leaning, “progressive” movements (though such causes are of course inherently conservative, in the literal, nonpolitical sense). At least in part their adoption may have been a reaction to the “one-nation-one-language” policies that were a hallmark of the fascist and quasi-fascist regimes of the century’s middle third, in contrast to the promotion of regional languages practiced by communist regimes. Even today, opposition to such policies as bilingual education is most likely to come from the right. But it wasn’t always thus. The French Revolution saw the dialects spoken by the masses of France (roughly three-quarters of them knew no French, according to a survey undertaken by Abbé Grégoire, the “patriot priest”) as obstacles to social progress; Grégoire’s report to the National Assembly was pointedly titled “On the need and the means to wipe out the patois and to universalize the use of the French language.” A century and a half later, the French linguist Albert Dauzat,⁽⁵⁾ writing about attitudes toward the use of Breton in Brittany in the 1920s, reported that “the socialists... are rather lukewarm if not hostile, not to mention that their internationalist views, in general, mesh poorly with regionalism. Conversely, all conservatives are ardent supporters of Breton among the peasants, whether to keep the latter tied to the land or for the sake of social conservation.” And as recently as the year 2000, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the leader of the leftmost faction of French socialism, resigned as interior minister in order to protest Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s plan of autonomy for Corsica that would include the teaching of Corsican in the island’s public schools.

Church and language

Indeed, most of the nineteenth-century movements that promoted the revival of previously suppressed languages (and of the national or regional identities underlying them) were conservative in nature. In much of Europe, the Catholic Church played no small part in them.

The Catholic Church has a very old tradition of fostering regional dialects. While, for the almost two millennia preceding Vatican II, the formal liturgy as well as the official writings of the Church (canon law, bulls, encyclicals) were in Latin, for a good deal of that time local vernaculars were used in the informal, mainly oral proceedings such as preaching and communal singing, but sometimes also including written uses such as parish records and individual pastoral letters (in Roussillon, Catalan was used by the Church as late as the 1890s, a century after the Revolution proclaimed the universality of French). It was already in the days of Charlemagne that, while the study of good Latin was promoted, clergy were enjoined by several Church Councils to preach “in the vulgar tongue, in order that the people may understand,” since the common people were no longer expected to understand Latin (the Council of Tours of 813 specifies “in Romance or German,” in rusticam romanam linguam aut theotiscam). While the boundaries of ecclesiastic provinces usually followed historical lines, dioceses were more often than not organized along linguistic ones; the “Leys d’Amor,” a 14th-century codification of Occitan poetry, specifically states that there are as many dialects (parladuras) as dioceses, except that the large diocese of Toulouse has several. Some relics of this organization have persisted until very recently; for example, the diocese of Lleida, in Catalonia (Spain), until the 1990s included a strip of land that has always belonged politically to Aragon, but where the spoken dialect is Catalan.

It was only when, in the wake of Vatican II, Latin was replaced by the “national” languages in the liturgy that the local dialects had to give way to the official standards. In part this was a recognition of the fact that, in the modern world, the laity in general could no longer be assumed to be illiterate, while literacy no longer implied knowing Latin.

The history of Protestant churches is quite different in this regard (a difference that seemed to be lost on Ferguson when he discussed the relation between religion and diglossia). The doctrine of justification by faith and the central place of the Bible as the sole source of truth and salvation – common to the Lutheran and Calvinist churches – meant that “[i]n order that all could have access to the Holy Writ, Protestantism soon came to stand for elementary education for all.”⁽⁶⁾ The result was that the language of the Bible version used by a given church was necessarily the language of the church and of schooling.

Now, a Bible translation was, and still is, a major undertaking, and obviously not every regional language variety could have one of its own.

Martin Luther is often given credit for creating modern German by means of his Bible translation. He deserves this credit only in the sense that the language of his translation immediately became the school language in those parts of historic Germany that turned Protestant, except for some northern states that, for a few generations, clung to Low German (which in the Middle Ages had a prestigious written standard). German as Luther wrote it is, in fact, not greatly different from that used by scribes and writers throughout middle and southern Germany since the early 15th century, when a kind of amalgam of Middle and High German began to be used in the Imperial chancery (at the time located in Prague) and in the chanceries of many states and cities.

When Denmark turned Lutheran, it imposed the Danish Bible in Norway, which was under its rule, on the not unreasonable assumption that the Norwegian dialects were close enough to Danish so that Norwegian children could learn the written language without too much difficulty. Swedish children could no doubt do the same, and probably would have if Sweden had not shaken off Danish rule a short time before the Reformation. As the American linguist Einar Haugen⁽⁷⁾ has written, “After their political separation the Swedes were not inclined to tolerate Da[nish] features in their writing, and chose to emphasize their differences. The [Bible] translators ... developed a fairly consistent norm, and one that on many points was consciously different from Da[nish].”

But the political motivation for a separate versus a common Bible language was the exception rather than the rule; usually, the motivation was pragmatic. A Bible translation was, as I said, a major project, to be undertaken if linguistically necessary; while the Norwegians did not get their own Bible under Danish rule, the Icelanders did. Similarly Finland, ruled by Sweden at Reformation time, got a Finnish Bible.

Scotland was an independent kingdom when John Knox, after many years in England and among the English in Geneva, returned to lead the Church of Scotland, bringing with him the Geneva Bible and a habit of preaching and writing in English. But even before this event, the Tyndale and Coverdale Bibles, as well as the Book of Common Prayer, were used by Scottish Protestants. The Lowland Scots did not perceive written English as a foreign language; they generally referred to their own language as Inglis, calling it Scottis mainly when they wanted to contrast it with that of England, which they called Southroun or Sudrun, that is, southern (to knap Southroun was to affect Anglicisms in speech). And so it was natural that English became the language of Scottish schools.

Further examples abound of areas where a Bible translation was adopted in a related language of a neighboring area, which then became the school language. Friesland, a self-governing province, adopted the Dutch Staten Bible; for Protestant Slovaks it was the Czech Bible of the Moravian Brothers. The Huguenots of southern France who spoke some variety or other of Occitan (including Gascon and Provençal) got their Bible in French. This was true even in Bearn and Lower Navarre, which, ruled by the House of Albret, were politically independent of France and thus unaffected by Francis I’s ordinance of 1539 making French the only legal language; indeed, a Bearnese variant of Gascon was the official language there long after the rest of southern France switched to French. Queen Jeanne d’Albret made Calvinism the official religion of her realm, and while she commissioned rhymed Psalm translations (for singing purposes) in Bearnese, as well as a bilingual (French-Bearnese) catechism for children, that was about as far as it went: the clergy were made to pronounce Au Diu bibent (Gascon for “by the living God”) when swearing upon the Bible, but the Bible on which they swore was in French, and so were church services. Protestantism was eventually suppressed in most of southern France, but it retained a stronghold in the Cévennes region, and as late as the 18th century travelers passing through it were astounded to find peasants in the Midi who actually knew French.

Jeanne understood, however, that for those of her subjects who spoke Basque – a language totally unrelated to any other – learning to read the Bible in French would be no simple matter, and therefore she commissioned a translation into Basque; while the project was not completed (only the New Testament was done before Jeanne’s son and successor Henri renounced Protestantism in order to become Henri IV of France), it marked the beginning of Basque as a written language.

Like the Basques and the Finns, other linguistic minorities whose language was significantly different from that of a given state’s majority got Bible translations of their own: the Slovenes inhabiting the Austrian province of Carniola (essentially present-day Slovenia) got one; the Sorbs or Wends of Lusatia in eastern Germany got not one but two, since they live in two non-contiguous communities, with the dialect of one (Lower Lusatia, in Brandenburg) closer to Polish and the other (Upper Lusatia, in Saxony) to Czech. And of the three separate valleys in Graubünden where Rhaeto-Romance (Romansch) dialects are spoken, each one got its own – a situation that still complicates language politics in Switzerland, where Romansch has been officially recognized as a national language since 1937, but only recently has a common standard been (grudgingly) agreed on.

In the kingdom of Hungary, however, those Protestants whose speech was Slovak were content with reading the Bible in the closely related Czech, which naturally became their standard (several of the foremost figures of nineteenth-century Czech literature were Slovaks). The pressure for a distinctly Slovak standard came, just as naturally, from the Catholic Church, though it was finally the Protestant �tur who formulated the modern standard.

Slavs, incidentally, seem to be more sensitive to diglossia than peoples of other language families. The difference between Czech and Slovak is often less than that between dialects of neighboring regions of Germany or Italy, but it was enough for the two peoples to regard themselves as distinct nations and to justify the breakup of Czechoslovakia. In Serbocroat, there are separate standards in Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia, and their users often like to think of them as “different languages.” Macedonian Slavs – who before 1910 considered themselves to be Bulgarians – developed, in the Yugoslavian (now independent) Republic of Macedonia, a standard as different from Bulgarian as they could possibly make it.

Strong and weak diglossia

Accepting, then, the universality of diglossia as proposed by Dagut, I would like to posit a distinction between two kinds, which I will call strong and weak.

Strong diglossia is what has up to know been called diglossia tout court: a situation where dialect and standard are different enough for their users to be fully aware of their being two distinct codes, with different names for them. To designate the dialect in this situation I will use the traditional term patois. This word has traditionally been used in this sense in the northern half of France, as well as neighboring areas of Belgium, Switzerland and Italy (Aosta Valley), in contrast to standard (or parastandard) French; a regional designation (picard, champenois and the like) might be used to contrast one patois with another. In the non-Romance parts of northern France (western Brittany, Alsace), however, the regional designation (breton, alsacien) is what is generally used (when not subsumed under the generic term dialecte), and this is also the norm in Italy and in southern and central Germany (napoletano, Schwäbisch, etc.), while in northern Germany and the Low Countries the generic platt – comparable to the English broad – is usual. In northern Spain, bable and fabla, both meaning, essentially, “speech,” have been used to designate the patois of Asturias-León and Aragón, respectively.

Weak diglossia, by contrast, occurs when the dialect is what I have called a parastandard, and in this case speakers usually think only in terms of “the language” (“English,” “French” or whatever) which may be used more or less “correctly” (the model of “correctness” being of course the standard), and discrepancies are perceived as “faults,” or at the very least as “colloquialisms,” but not as indications of distinct language varieties. To cite a sociolinguistic research example, “the French spoken by the indigenous inhabitants [of Brussels] developed into a separate variety, different from Belgian French ... Belgian French displays a number of typical features that distinguish it from standard French... For many speakers, it was not entirely clear what was meant with [sic] Brussels French. To them, there was only one variety of French.”⁽⁸⁾

The difference in thinking is especially marked during periods of transition from strong to weak diglossia (which occurs, as I have remarked, as secondary schooling becomes universal). To use French again as an example: in Corsica, the generation (those born before 1945, more or less) that grew up speaking Corsican while learning French in school believes that it speaks “[true] French, with all the grammar and all the rules,” while young people “don’t speak it so well,” that is, they speak it “more naturally.”⁽⁹⁾

This transition was once a slow process. In the Protestant regions of Europe where the Bible language was noticeably different from the vernacular, it is generally attested that the change didn’t occur in any great measure, even among the more educated urban classes, until the 18th century, a good two centuries after the Reformation. Examples include the displacement of Norwegian by a Norwegianized form of Danish (Dano-Norwegian, the basis of what is now called bokmål), of Scots by a Scottish-inflected English, of Frisian by a Frisianized Dutch (called Stadfries or “city Frisian”). In the aforementioned Cévennes region of southern France, while knowledge of standard French was common, everyday speech was in Occitan until the nineteenth century.

In northern Germany, it appears that in Hanover – perhaps because of the presence of the electoral (later royal) court – a parastandard High German was spoken by the 18th century as well, at least among the educated, with the curious result that Hanover speech – though non-native – became the model of German pronunciation on the stage (Bühnendeutsch), since everywhere else in Germany dialects were still spoken by everyone. Other capitals (Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Vienna) eventually developed their own Umgangssprachen, but the Hanover model remained the ideal. In the Hansa cities, however, even the merchant class spoke Low German till the end of the nineteenth century, as attested (for Lübeck) in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

In the twentieth century the process has been greatly accelerated by the mass media, which carry the parastandard of the cultural centers to once isolated areas where formerly the standard was learned only in school. This doesn’t mean that the parastandard heard on television, on radio or in the movies is necessarily the one adopted, except perhaps by a minority that wants to appear up-to-date. In France, Spain and the United States, the peculiar southern modalities of speech seem to be resisting the dominance of Parisian French, Madrid Spanish and “General American” English, respectively. (In the United Kingdom a kind of reversal seems to be taking place: British people no longer feel the need to lose their regional accents as they rise socially, and the BBC is no longer dominated by speakers of Received Pronunciation [RP], so that this variety has lost its former designation of ‘BBC English.’) What it does mean is that massive exposure to parastandard changes the perception of the “language” from that of a rigid, school-taught and rule-bound medium to that of a living, spoken one – since people don’t consciously differentiate between standard and parastandard – and makes it easier for them to form their own parastandard.

The displacement of a dialect by a parastandard is, however, but one possible way of weakening diglossia. The opposite can happen as well: an old standard is replaced by a new one that is based on the dialect of a prestigious locality (such as Beijing for modern standard Chinese).

The standardization of dialects for literary purposes is usually driven by regional or ethnic consciousness, not purely literary needs. When individual authors have chosen to write in dialect, typically in order to represent the speech of common folk, they have usually created their own versions (examples in American literature include Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple). It is only in the context of a collective effort that a standardized written form for a dialect is created. In Europe this has, historically, been limited at first to the needs of poetry, narrative and other popular forms, with science, history, law and the like being left in the domain of the standard.

I will call such a more-or-less standardized version of a dialect a semistandard. Many modern standards began life as semistandards. In medieval Western and Central Europe, for example, Latin was the universal standard, and the written forms of the vernacular were used mainly for popular poetry and stories. It is significant that Dante, who may be said to have created literary Italian, wrote his famous essay on the subject, De vulgari eloquentia, in Latin, just as Pompeu Fabra, the codifier of modern Catalan, wrote his first Catalan grammar in Spanish.

A semistandard may acquire official status and become the language of elementary (but usually not secondary) education, or of parliamentary debate (but not bills); this is the case of Lëtzebuergesch in Luxembourg (which in addition to this semistandard has two standards, French and German) and of Haitian Creole. There can thus be situations where a patois, a semistandard based on it, a standard and a parastandard exist side by side, as is the case of the Peruvian highlands, where a Quechua semistandard (based on Cuzco speech) now has a measure of official status.

Standard Catalan began its ascent from semistandard to full standard in the 1930s, but this process was rudely interrupted by the Franco regime. It was quickly completed, however, in constitutional Spain after 1979.

In Catalonia today, the population is split about evenly between those who use Spanish and those who use Catalan as their primary vernacular (though there are many families, especially in Barcelona, where both languages are spoken interchangeably). In addition, standard Spanish and standard Catalan are both official at all levels of government and education. Only in the courts does Spanish have an advantage, due to Spain’s centralized judiciary in which judges may be assigned to positions all over the country. In the autonomous parliament and local councils, by contrast, Catalan predominates, as it does in the realm of “high” culture: it is the only language of supertitles at the opera, while at lectures, book presentations and poetry readings, even if the text presented is itself in Spanish (or any other language), the introductions are likely to be in Catalan.

Technically, then, those who speak Catalan as their primary dialect and use Spanish as their preferred standard (as well as the reverse, though in this case the numbers are probably small) are in a state of strong diglossia, while those whose linguistic lives are spent entirely (or mostly) in one or the other are weakly diglossic. There are, in fact, people in Catalonia (both in the working class that has immigrated from elsewhere in Spain and the native aristocracy that looked to Madrid for inspiration) who have never bothered to learn Catalan, spoken or written. (The converse, though it exists, is rare.) But for most Catalonians⁽¹⁰⁾ the situation is rather muddled. In particular, younger people of the Barcelona middle class are equally fluent in Catalan and Spanish oral and written use, so that their situation is the peculiar one of bilingual weak diglossia – weak by definition, because they don’t think of the colloquial and formal versions of either language as distinct language varieties.

Teaching “the language”

The tendency, in societies with more-or-less universal schooling, of diglossia to metamorphose from strong to weak (by either of the two processes outlined above) illustrates something like a social analogue to the second law of thermodynamics: weak diglossia represents greater uniformity, and hence higher entropy, than strong diglossia.

I don’t know enough economic theory to know if there is a corresponding economic law, but it also appears that in terms of educational resource allocation, weak diglossia is cheaper. Teaching the standard in a situation of strong diglossia is, at least at first, like teaching a foreign language, and requires a corresponding effort, including teachers with special qualifications, and the recognition that a whole new code has to be taught at the same time that literacy is first introduced. It certainly seems easier to teach children how to read and write words that they already know.

Of course, appearances can deceive. I recall that, when I lived in France over forty years ago, it was reported that the highest scores on the baccalauréat exams (largely measured by the ability to write formal French) were attained by Alsatians and Corsicans, who at that time were still strongly diglossic. I remember thinking at the time that this was precisely because they learned standard French as a quasi-foreign language, with little chance of its being contaminated through a prior use of colloquial French.⁽¹¹⁾ I compared this process to my own experience of learning English (which is now my primary language) from scratch at the age of ten; I learned every word simultaneously in its spoken and written form, and consequently I make no spelling errors. I had also mastered the rules of standard English grammar before I learned to speak the vernacular in colloquial fashion, and I daresay that I use standard English more “grammatically” than most native speakers (Chomsky’s theories to the contrary notwithstanding).

The previously quoted comments by older Corsicans, comparing their own mastery of (standard) French with that of their juniors, are another case in point, as is the fact that “the French of some people from Haiti or the French West Indies [whose vernacular is Creole] appears stilted or excessively formal to speakers from France.”⁽¹²⁾

In French-speaking societies, the differences between formal and informal language are more sharply marked than in most other weakly diglossic ones, through the concept of “registers.” In the vernacular certain verb forms of standard French – the simple past and the imperfect subjunctive – are simply not used, the interrogative is constructed differently, the negative particle ne is often skipped, and so on. But, even if such standard features are heard as “stilted or excessively formal,” they are still judged as “more correct” or “better” French. It may even be, as Leonard Bloomfield wrote in 1927, that the notion that “some persons are felt to be better models of conduct and speech than others... may be a generally human state of affairs, true in every group and applicable to all languages, and the factor of Standard and Literary Language versus dialect may be a superadded secondary one.”⁽¹³⁾

The great pitfall in teaching the standard to children who speak a parastandard is the generalized belief, even (especially) on the part of teachers, that they are not distinct language varieties but that the former is just a “better” and the latter a “worse” form of “the language.” Rather than introducing the standard as a code to be mastered, with special emphasis on the ways in which it differs from the vernacular – which, however, would be acknowledged as a valid medium in its own right – teachers set out to “correct” what are called “faulty speech habits.” Many such corrections may be based on grammarians’ outdated notions of correctness; an example in English is the proscription of ‘they’ (‘them,’ ‘their’) in the sense of ‘he or she’ (‘him or her,’ ‘his or her’) – a usage that goes back (in writing!) to Middle English and includes Shakespeare, Byron and most notably Jane Austen.

Among non-immigrant English-speakers of North America, diglossia is generally weak except among those whose dialect is AAVE (African-American Vernacular English, also known as Black English and – unfortunately – as Ebonics). The notorious Ebonics controversy of 1997 resulted from an attempt (however clumsy) to teach standard English to AAVE-speaking children in the way that such teaching is done in strong diglossia, implying, of course, an acknowledgment that the dialect (in this case a patois) is a legitimate language variety. But this kind of acknowledgment is difficult for a society accustomed to think in terms of “good English” versus “bad English,” with Black English a particular case of the latter.

Another perverse effect of teaching the standard as a “better” form of the language is that it sets up, in those of a rebellious or simply an intellectually lazy nature, a negative reaction to authority in the form of a refusal to adopt the norms of the standard even under circumstances that clearly call for it. I can’t think of a better example of this effect than the diction of the current President of the United States.

Notes

1. "Diglossia” in Word, Vol. 15 (1959).

2. An Outline of the History of the Greek Language with Particular Emphasis on the Koine and the Subsequent Stages (1936).

3. Medieval and Modern Greek (1969).

4. "The revival of Hebrew and language planning” in J. D. Woods (ed.), Language Standards and their Codification: Process and Application (1985).

5. Les patois; évolution-classification-étude (1946).

6. H. P. Douglas and E. deS. Brunner, The Protestant Church as a Social Institution (1935).

7. The Scandinavian Languages (1976).

8. Jeannine Treffers-Daller, Mixing Two Languages: French-Dutch Contact in a Comparative Perspective (1994). The difference between the French-speaking inhabitants of Brussels and those of the rest of Belgium is that for the former French has displaced Flemish, while for the latter it has displaced the Walloon patois.

9. Marie-José Dalbera-Stefanaggi, “Les corses et leurs langues: science et conscience” in J.-C. Bouvier (ed.), Les Français et leurs langues (1991).

10. Here I am taking advantage of the distinction that English allows between “Catalonian” (referring to the country of Catalonia) and “Catalan” (referring to the language and culture), analogous to “Serbian” versus “Serb.”

11. If there is any linguistic contamination in strong diglossia, it is usually the opposite: the vernacular contaminated by the standard. “Spanglish” is a well-known example; another is the extent to which colloquial Catalan has been affected by Spanish during the hundreds of years that the latter was the only school language, to the extent that many Catalan-speakers name the letters of the alphabet in Spanish, including (with sounds that don’t exist in Catalan) [θe] for C and [χe] for G.

12. Gertrud Aub-Buscher, “French and French-based Creoles: the case of the French Caribbean” in C. Sanders (ed.), French Today (1993).

13. “Literate and illiterate speech” in C. F. Hockett (ed.), A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology (1970).

November 12, 2002

Revised July 20, 2004

© 2002 by Jacob Lubliner

http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~coby/essays/refdigl.htm