Mohamed BenAbdellah University

Faculty of letters and Sidi Human Sciences Saiss Fes

S. 5. Linguistics Option.
...........................................
Course : Sociolinguistics
Instructor: Prof. Bousfiha

Diaglossia
1. Definition
Ferguson (1959) was the first one to define diaglossia as referring to the
situation where there are two varieties of the same language and each one of
them fulfills a different function. Such functional differentiation is generally
socially based and culturally valued,i.e. there is a consensus that one variety has
a high status and another a low status. Normally in such a situation, there is a
functional division between the two. The high is reserved for formal public use
and it is legally recognised as the official language of the nation, while the low,
with its unofficial status, is limited to the spoken channel of communication.
High and low varieties vary in grammar, lexis and phonology. The low
variety is generally reduced (reduction principle) and simplified. It borrows
from foreign and second languages. The high variety is characterised by formal
linguistic features, because it is more complex and more conservative. It resists
change as it is enshrined in a much respected and ancient literature.

2. Functions of high and low varieties

High Low
Used in:

 Administration  Folk Literature

 Literature  Oral popular Literature
 Written Media  Hearth and home use
 Education Streets and markets
 Law  Everyday communication
 Government  Intimacy
 Primary group solidarity
 3. Status of high and low varieties

the functions established by society for each of the high and low varieties
determine their status :

High Low
 Prestigious (religious prestige)  Much criticised and negatively
 Sign of education valued
 Carries the cultural heritage  Sign of ignorance
 Embodies the past, present and  Carries a stigma
future of all societies using it,  Subject to change and also
( take the example of classical decay
Arabic, which is a symbol of  Has native speakers.
the unity of the Arab world)  Doesn't have a settled
 Stable orthography
 Doesn't have any native  Doesn't have a standard
speakers. pronunciation because there are
 Has standard pronunciation different varieties
 Allows communication in
cross-dialectal situations

4. Diaglossia as conceived by Fishman

Initially, the term diaglossia was coined by Ferguson (1959) to refer to

those situations where we have clear division of functions between two varieties
of the same language, one being considered as low and the other as high.
Ferguson exemplified this by such apparently diverse speech communities as
Arabic, English and French Creole, modern Greek and Swiss German. This is
Ferguson's classical definition of diglossia.
Fishman (1970), on the basis of investigations done on diaglossic
communities, redefined the term diglossia and revised its recognition. For him,
diaglossia exists even in the situation of two different languages existing side
by side, i.e. there is no restriction for the existence of varieties of the same
language. From Fishman's perspective, diglossia exists when there are two
distinct languages (not two varieties of the same language) that fulfill two
distinct functions.
For Fishman, there is a distinction to be done between bilingualism and
diglossia. He presents bilingualism as being a trait of the individual, and
diglossia as being essentially a situation of two different functions of two
languages. The latter situation is that of societal bilingualism (diaglossia) and
the former is bilingualism on the level of the individual .In other words, focus
with bilingualism is essentially on individual linguistic behavior whereas with
diglossia it is on the linguistic organization at the socio-cultural level.

Fishman demonstrates that it is possible for there to be four sets of

relationship between bilingualism and diglossia (a) diaglossia without
bilingualism,(b) diaglossia and bilingualism, (c) bilingalism without diaglossia
and (d) neither bilingualism nor diaglossia.

There are situations in which diglossia

1. Diaglossia without bilingualism
obtains whereas bilingualism is generally
absent . Here, two or more speech
communities are united religiously, politically
or economically into a single functioning unit.
However, their linguistic repertoires are
discontinuous due to role specialization.
Examples of such situations are listed by
Kloss, (1966). Pre-First World War European
elites often stood in this relationship with
their countrymen, the elites speaking French
or some other fashionable H tongue for their
intragroup purposes (at various times and in
various places: Danish, Salish, Provençal,
Russian, etc.) and the masses speaking
another, not necessarily linguistically related,
language for their intragroup purposes. Since
the majority of elites and the majority of the
masses never interacted with one another they
did not form a single speech community.
A similar situation can arise in the third world
where an alite may choose to operate in the
language of the previous coloniser and either
avoid contact with the masses or
communicate with them in some pidgenised
variety of the high.
Since the majority of the elites and the
majority of the masses led lives characterized
by extremely narrow role repertoires their
linguistic repertoires too were too narrow to

2.Diglossia and biligualism
permit widespread societal bilingualism to
develop. Nevertheless, the body politic in all
of its economic and national manifestations
tied these two groups together into a “unity”
that revealed an upper and a lower class, each
with a language appropriate to its own
restricted concerns. Thus, the existence of
national diglossia does not imply widespread
bilingualism amongst rural or recently
urbanized African groups (as distinguished
from Westernized elites in those settings); nor
amongst most lower caste Hindus, as
distinguished from their more fortunate
compatriots the Brahmins, nor amongst most
lower class French-Canadians, as
distinguished from their upper and upper
middle-class city cousins, etc. (Fishman
1970)
A rare but possible situation in which a large
proportion of the population can operate in
more than one nationally recognised code is
that in which not only is there a functional
division between the two codes, but also a
general consensus that one of the codes is to
be considered as higher than the other.
An example of this type of nation is
Paraguay, where almost the entire population
speaks both Spanish and Guarani (Rubin,
1962; 1968). The formerly monolingual rural
population has added Spanish to its linguistic
repertoire in order to talk and write about
education, religion, government, high culture
and social distance or, more generally, the
status stressing spheres; whereas the
majority of city dwellers (being relatively new
from the country) maintain Guarani for
matters of intimacy and primary group
solidarity even in the midst of Spanish
urbanity.1 A further example is the Swiss-
German cantons in which the entire
population of school age and older alternates

3.Bilingualism without diaglossia
Neither diglossia nor bilingualism
between High German (H) and Swiss German
(L), each with its own firmly established and
highly valued functions (Weinreich, 1951;
1953; Ferguson, 1959).
A similar example is that of upper and upper
middle-class males throughout the Arabic
world who use classical (koranic) and
vernacular (Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese,
Iraqui, etc.) Arabic and, not infrequently, also
a Western language (French or English, most
usually) for purposes of intragroup scientific
or technological communication (Ferguson,
1959; Nader, 1962; Blanc, 1964).
There are , no doubt, important implications
involved in bilingual-diaglossic speech
communities in respect of language planning
in general and education in particular.
It is common for certain sections of a
community to operate in more than one
language for their everyday social
interactions. In Belgium, for example, is not a
diaglossic community even if, along the Dutch
French language boundary, there is a
functional division between the roles that the
individual Dutch speaker is likely to play in
the Dutch language and in French since there
is no agreement among Belgians that either
language is H or L. The two are rather
assigned a co-equal national official status and
this makes of Belgians bilingual citisens and
of Belgium a non diglossic nation.
Gumperz (1962) and Fisherman (1965) argue
that Only very small, isolated and
undifferentiated speech communities may be
said to reveal neither diglossia nor
 bilingualism . The little role differentiation
and frequent face-to-face interaction between
all members of the speech community make it
that no totally differentiated registers or
varieties may establish themselves. for such
reasons it is difficult to find or isolate a
linguistic situation where there is no
bilingualism nor diglossia because all
communities seem to have linguistic
repertoires that contain certain terms
unknown to certain members of the speech
community, and certain terms that are used
differently by different subsets of speakers.

Final Notes

Fishman has extended Ferguson's original formulation of diglossia and

proposed the above mentioned four possible types of relationships between
diglossia and bilingualism. For Fishman (1967), bilingualism is the speaker's
ability to use more than one language. ... while diglossia is the co-existence of
two varieties of the same language (according to Ferguson) or two langauges
(according to Fishman) that fulfill distinct functions.

 Fishman (2003) exemplifies this with the linguistic situation of H

German and L Swiss German in Switzerland (varieties of the same language),
and the linguistic situation in Paraguay of Spanish and Guarani (different
languages). Although almost everybody speaks both varieties, the high variety,
Spanish, is used in domains such as education, religion and government, while
the low variety, Guarani, is used in everyday intra-group encounters.

Based on the Fishman's model (Fishman, 1967), North African Arabic,

known as Maghrebi Arabic, is classified as a linguistic situation in the speech
community characterised by diglossia with bilingualism. The intense language
contact between related and unrelated languages has resulted mainly in two
widespread linguistic phenomena : code-switching and borrowing.

Study Activities
 Ferguson argues and demonstrates that in many speech communities, two
or more varieties of the same language are used by members of the speech
community under different conditions. Ferguson, as mentioned before, gives the
examples of many areas characterised by such division in use and in function of
the standard language and regional dialect as in "Italian or Persian, where many
speakers speak their local dialect at home or among family or friends of the
same dialect area but use the standard language in communicating with speakers
of other dialects or on public occasions. There are, however, quite different
examples of the use of two varieties of a language in the same speech
community. In Baghdad the Christian Arabs speak a ‘Christian Arabic’ dialect
when talking among themselves but speak the general Baghdad dialect, ‘Muslim
Arabic’, when talking in a mixed group. " (Ferguson 2000: 58).
See if we can extend the argument to the Moroccan linguistic situation
and reality, and try to describe, on the basis of the Moroccan speech
communities' use of Moroccan Arabic and standard Arabic ( or of other totally
different languages), what function is reserved for any of the varieties or
languages used in the Moroccan context and show what type of relationship we
can possibly establish between qiglossia and bilingualism in the Moroccan
community, with reference to fishman's four isolated categories.
Further reading and references
Ervin-tripp.S. "Sociolinguistics" Working paper n:3. Brkeley, 1967.
Ferguson. C.A. "Diaglossia" Word. V. 15 (pp. 325-40) 1959
"Diaglossia" in Li Wei (ed) 'The Bilingualism reader'
Routledge: London (2000) (2001)
Fishman.J.A. "Readings in the Sociology of Language" Mouton 1968.
" Bilingualism with and without Diglossia, Diglossia with
and without Bilingualism" in Li Wei (ed) 'The Bilingualism
reader" Routledge: London (2000) (2001)
Gumperz. J.J. "Types of linguistic Communication" Anthropological
Linguistics, v: 4, N.1. pp. 28-40. 1962.
Pride. J.B. and Homes.J. (eds) "Sociolinguistics" Penguin : England 1982
Wardhaugh. R. " An Introduction to Sociolinguistics" Blackwell; Oxford
2006.