Diglossia

Language Death \ Language Maintenance

Diglossia

In linguistics, diglossia refers to a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community.
In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular (A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca), language variety (labeled "L" or "low" variety), a second, highly codified variety (labeled "H" or "high") is used in certain situations such as literature, formal education, or other specific settings, but not used for ordinary conversation.

The high variety may be an older stage of the same language (e.g. Latin in the early Middle Ages), or a distinct yet closely related present day dialect (e.g. Norwegian with Bokml and Nynorsk, or Chinese with Mandarin as the official, literary standard and colloquial topolects/dialects used in everyday communication).

If languages of equal standing within a community are increasingly mixed (such as in English and Maltese in Malta) this phenomenon is called convergence.[citation needed]. Tamil language is a diglossic language because it has two variations for spoken and written.

Sociolinguistics

As an aspect of study of the relationships between codes and social structure, diglossia is an important concept in the field of sociolinguistics. At the social level, each of the two dialects has certain spheres of social interaction assigned to it and in the assigned spheres it is the only socially acceptable dialect (with minor exceptions). At the grammatical level, differences may involve pronunciation, inflection, and/or syntax (sentence structure). Differences can range from minor (although conspicuous) to extreme. In many cases of diglossia, the two dialects are so divergent that they are distinct languages as defined by linguists: they are not mutually intelligible.

The dialect which is the original mother tongue is almost always held in low esteem; it is of low prestige. Its spheres of use involve informal, interpersonal communication: conversation in the home, among friends, in marketplaces. In some diglossias, this vernacular dialect is virtually unwritten. Those who try to give it a literature may be severely criticized or even persecuted. The other dialect is held in high esteem and is devoted to written communication and formal spoken communication, such as university instruction, primary education, sermons, and speeches by government officials.

It is usually not possible to acquire proficiency in the formal, "high" dialect without formal study of it.

Thus in those diglossic societies which are also characterized by extreme inequality of social classes, most people are not proficient in speaking the high dialect, and if the high dialect is grammatically different enough, as in the case of Arabic diglossia, then these uneducated classes cannot understand most of the public speeches they might hear on television and radio.

The high prestige dialect (or language) tends to be the more formalised, and its forms and vocabulary often 'filter down' into the vernacular, though often in a changed form.

The pioneering scholar of diglossia, Charles A. Ferguson, observed that native speakers proficient in the high prestige dialect will commonly try to avoid using the vernacular dialect with foreigners and may even deny its existence, even though the vernacular is the only socially appropriate one for them themselves to use when speaking to their relatives and friends. Yet another common attitude is that the low dialectwhich is everyone's native languageought to be abandoned in favor of the high dialect, which presently is nobody's native language.

Language registers and types of diglossia

In Charles A. Ferguson's article "Diglossia" , was described as a kind of bilingualism in a society in which one of the languages is (H), i.e. has high prestige, and another of the languages is (L), i.e. has low prestige.In Ferguson's definition, (H) and (L) are always closely related.

In some cases (especially with creole languages), the nature of the connection between (H) and (L) is not one of diglossia but a continuum; for example, Jamaican Creole as (L) and Standard English as (H) in Jamaica.

(H) is usually the written language whereas (L) is the spoken language. In formal situations, (H) is used; in informal situations, (L) is used. One of the earliest known examples is Latin, Classical Latin being the (H) and Vulgar Latin the (L). The latter, which is almost completely unattested in text, is the tongue from which the Romance languages descended.

Examples where the High/Low dichotomy is justified in terms of social prestige include Italian dialects as (L) and Standard Italian as (H) in Italy and German dialects and standard German in Germany. In Italy and Germany, those speakers who still speak dialects typically use dialect in informal situations, especially in the family.

In German-speaking Switzerland, on the other hand, Swiss German dialects are to a certain extent even used in schools and to a larger extent in churches.
Ramseier calls German-speaking Switzerland's diglossia a "medial diglossia", whereas Felicity Rash prefers "functional diglossia".Paradoxically, Swiss German offers both the best example of diglossia (all speakers are native speakers of Swiss German and thus diglossic) and the worst, because there is no clear-cut hierarchy.

Language death

In linguistics, language death (also language extinction or linguistic extinction) is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and/or fluent speakers of the variety. Language death may affect any language idiom, including dialects and languages.

Language death should not be confused with language attrition (also called language loss) which describes the loss of proficiency in a language at the individual level.

Types of language death

Language death may manifest itself in one of the following ways: gradual language death bottom-to-top language death: when a language begins to change in a low level place such as the home.

top-to-bottom language death: when a language begins to change in a high level place such as the government.
radical language death linguicide (a.k.a. sudden language death, language death by genocide, physical language death, biological language death)

The most common process leading to language death is one in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual in another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language until they cease to use their original (or heritage) language. This is a process of assimilation which may be voluntary or may be forced upon a population. Speakers of some languages, particularly regional or minority languages, may decide to abandon them based on economic or utilitarian grounds, in favour of languages regarded as having greater utility or prestige. This process is gradual and can occur from either bottom-to-top or top-to-bottom.

Languages with a small, geographically isolated population of speakers can also die when their speakers are wiped out by genocide, disease, or natural disaster.

A language is often declared to be dead even before the last native speaker of the language has died. If there are only a few elderly speakers of a language remaining, and they no longer use that language for communication, then the language is effectively dead. A language that has reached such a reduced stage of use is generally considered moribund.

Once a language is no longer a native language - that is, if no children are being socialised into it as their primary language - the process of transmission is ended and the language itself will not survive past the current generation.

This is rarely a sudden event, but a slow process of each generation learning less and less of the language, until its use is relegated to the domain of traditional use, such as in poetry and song. Typically the transmission of the language from adults to children becomes more and more restricted, to the final setting that adults speaking the language will raise children who never acquire fluency.

Language revitalization

Language revitalization is an attempt to slow or reverse language death. Revitalization programs are ongoing in many languages, and have had varying degrees of success. The revival of the Hebrew language in Israel is the only example of a language which has become a language with new first language speakers after it became extinct in everyday use for an extended period, being used only as a liturgical language. And even in the case of Hebrew, there is a theory that argues that "the Hebrew revivalists who wished to speak pure Hebrew failed. The result is a fascinating and multifaceted Israeli language, which is not only multilayered but also multi-sourced. The revival of a clinically dead language is unlikely without cross-fertilisation from the revivalists' mother tongue(s)."

Dead languages and normal language change

Language death takes place when a language in the course of its normal development gradually morphs into something that is then recognized as a separate, different language, leaving the old form with no native speakers. Thus, for example, Old English may be regarded as a "dead language", with no native speakers, although it has never "died" but instead simply changed and developed into Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English.

The process of language change may also involve the splitting up of a language into a family of several daughter languages, leaving the common parent language "dead". This has happened to Latin, which (through Vulgar Latin) eventually developed into the Romance languages.
Such a process is normally not described as "language death", because it involves an unbroken chain of normal transmission of the language from one generation to the next, with only minute changes at every single point in the chain. There is thus no one point where Latin "died".