Is there any good sides to diglossia?

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Nooj
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Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Nooj »

Some of the languages I'm learning, notably Arabic, have pronounced diglossia. I actually like the standard High language as well as the non standard Low language, but I'm wondering if there's any real benefit or good side to having such a diglossic situation.

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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by malloc »

What other alternatives are you considering? One where everyone speaks the same variety instead of one standard and various vernaculars? One without a shared standard, only multiple vernaculars? Regarding the former alternative, I suppose the benefit is saving political authorities the trouble of extirpating all those vernaculars in favor of one standard (no simple task when the language is spoken across multiple countries and continents as Arabic is). Regarding the latter, the standard variety allows people with different vernaculars to communicate.

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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Travis B. »

That is essentially asking whether there is any benefit to linguistic diversity as a whole or to being able to mark in-group versus out-group interactions; if one says that diglossia is a bad thing, one implies that all linguistic diversity is a bad thing, that that all people should only speak one (standardized) language without any internal diversity.
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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Ars Lande »

Having a common vehicular language. Vernacular languages spoken in the Arab World are not intercomprehensible.

I heard from Moroccans that there are calls to promote darija (Maghrebi Arabic) over Modern Standard Arabic. Presumably, the cost of learning MSA is becoming too high - it certainly feels more useful for Moroccans to speak English, Spanish or French than MSA.

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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Nooj »

I was thinking more about a pluricentric language model where there IS no standard...I don't know how that would work. I mean German is pluricentric, but of course there is one standard. Is it impossible to have different national standards of Arabic, but also have MSA at the same time, or is that having my cake and eating it too?

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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Salmoneus »

Nooj wrote:I was thinking more about a pluricentric language model where there IS no standard...I don't know how that would work. I mean German is pluricentric, but of course there is one standard. Is it impossible to have different national standards of Arabic, but also have MSA at the same time, or is that having my cake and eating it too?
So you want triglossia instead, then? People speak their local dialect, but then have to learn a "national standard" as well, AND then have to learn in international standard on top of that? Seems like a bit of a hassle!

[Though that might be the case for some people in Switzerland, who speak their cantonal German language, then speak official Swiss Standard German, and then also at least understand German Standard German, being a more internationally prestigious form than Swiss Standard German. (and in some areas then also speak French on top of that)]
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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Travis B. »

Nooj wrote:I was thinking more about a pluricentric language model where there IS no standard...I don't know how that would work. I mean German is pluricentric, but of course there is one standard. Is it impossible to have different national standards of Arabic, but also have MSA at the same time, or is that having my cake and eating it too?
You mean like English, where there are non-standard varieties and there are standard languages, but there is no one single standard language, with the standard languages all being very crossintelligible. Of course, it should be noted that most non-standard varieties of English are also largely crossintelligible with one another, so switching into a standard language is not necessary much of the time even when speaking with individuals who non-negligibly different varieties.
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by linguoboy »

Salmoneus wrote:[Though that might be the case for some people in Switzerland, who speak their cantonal German language, then speak official Swiss Standard German, and then also at least understand German Standard German, being a more internationally prestigious form than Swiss Standard German. (and in some areas then also speak French on top of that)]
The differences a really minor, amounting to a few orthographical features (most notably the absence of <ß> from the Swiss standard), a handful of grammatical features (e.g. preferring sein to haben when forming the perfect of certain verbs), and several dozen vocabulary items, many of them referring to Swiss-specific institutions. There's no need to switch standards for oral communication (particularly when talking to people from adjoining parts of Germany, which share some of the same vocabulary) and when it comes to written communication, it's basically on the level of adopting the house style of a particular publisher.

Some Germans have issues with the Swiss accent, but these same people would probably have trouble understanding anyone from sufficiently south of Eisenach.

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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Curlyjimsam »

One possibility:

You can't stop language change - but in some situations (which lead eventually to diglossia) you can arrest it somewhat for the "standard" or "high" language, which means texts from centuries past continue to be widely accessible for much longer.

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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Pole, the »

Is there any good sides to diglossia?
No.

Case closed. You're welcome.
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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by gach »

I don't know. Using literary standard in speech is a wonderful way for showing emotional detachment.

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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Viktor77 »

It's helpful to have a high language for written communication, especially where vernacular varieties diverge considerably. I suppose the answer is that it depends. If the high language is used to mark education or culture and thus the opposite for a low variety, then you might be able to argue that a high language could be detrimental to social mobility in a given low variety speech community that doesn't have resources or need to learn or perfect a high variety.

An example of this are Arabic classes in Parisian schools. The idea was a good one at heart, add Arabic as a foreign language option given the high number of students of Magrebi and Berber origin in Paris. The problem is that the teachers often only teach high Arabic and so the dialects that these students encounter in their daily lives go ignored and the students thus find little use out of taking Arabic at school. Their local varieties can't help them much to learn the high variety and the high variety serves as a demotivator because it is not very useful for them.

A better situation might be polynomy, where there are various centers of authenticity and various standards and one is not perceived as better than the other. This is the situation with Corsican which has a few different orthographies and a few different standards based on different dialects. Polynomy is not very natural so one standard will likely become a high variety. In fact, some studies have already shown this in Corsican language education, though the high variety usually becomes whatever standard/orthography the teacher speaks and knows. I remember reading about one such circumstance where a local carpenter came to give a presentation at a school in Ajaccio. The man, Corsican from birth, began describing carpentry tools but used gallicized names for many of the tools. The teacher then instructed the students to find the Corsican equivalents of these tools. In effect the language ecology of this particular classroom treated the Corsican carpenter's gallicized Corsican as a low variety and the teacher's more pure Corsican variety (filled in part with neologisms) as a high variety. Polynomy thus partially broke down in the ecology of the Corsican language classroom.
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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ »

In my opinion, the only things that need being standardised for all users of one language are official (i.e. law and administration) and technical language (like in scientific papers) as it is necessary for them to be understandable for everybody.
The rest of language, I think, shouldn't be codified using such adjectives like "correct" or "incorrect". I just like regarding languages as an integral part of culture which shouldn't be treated like language councils treat them right now.
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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by Travis B. »

To me at least, diglossia is just standardization of formal language, whether as a single standard or as a group of closely related standards, while leaving informal language be taken to its final conclusion. And standardization of formal language is highly useful, to enable communication with people who do not speak one's own variety, to enable reading things written in the less-than-recent past, to provide a very well-defined grammar that is useful in technical and administrative language, and so on. But to insist that everyone speak a standard variety in their everyday lives is pure prescriptivism, negating any distinction between formality and informality, between in-group and out-group comunication, and encouraging homogenization and centralization. So while it would be convenient if there were no diglossia per se, that everyone just spoke and wrote their own variety and all their varieties were crossintelligible both in speech and in writing, diglossia is certainly preferable over both having a range of non-crossintelligible varieties with no "high" varieties that enable communication between those who speak them and simply attempting to wipe out "low" varieties and replace them with a single "high" variety or a small group of closely aligned "high" varieties.
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Re: Is there any good sides to diglossia?

Post by jmcd »

ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ wrote:In my opinion, the only things that need being standardised for all users of one language are official (i.e. law and administration) and technical language (like in scientific papers) as it is necessary for them to be understandable for everybody.
The rest of language, I think, shouldn't be codified using such adjectives like "correct" or "incorrect". I just like regarding languages as an integral part of culture which shouldn't be treated like language councils treat them right now.
I agree.

--

A problem with diglossia is that the 'low' varieties don't get enough recognition (and that can lead to the elimination of the 'low' varieties). A positive point is that they can all be bilingual. As far as I can tell, the situation in Luxembourg and Switzerland has more of the positive aspects and less of the negative ones.

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