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Diglossic? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4549 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 9 of 15 11 December 2011 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You as a speaker cannot be diglossic. Only a language can be.
Diglossic= with two different language parts: H (high) used for writing; L (low) used in everyday life. Arabic, Tamil, Kannada, Swiss German, Belgian French, Czech, Brazilian Portuguese some say even Finish The opposite is ''dialectal tolerance'' used in Norway. If you want to write in a language close to your dialect? You can, by using Nynorsk or Radical Bokmal. In Brazil you cannot really write in NeoBrazilian or Radical Brazilian Portuguese, because we have only a Dano-Norwegian-like situation (our literal standard is based on 19th century European Portuguese, with different pronunciation and words). There are some (but very few) Brazilian writers using the L-form (basilect), for example Mário de Andrade. Paulo Coelho writes in a mesolect, and it is criticized by doing so by the purists (who want every Brazilian to write in the artificial H form). Edited by Camundonguinho on 11 December 2011 at 4:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fomalhaut Groupie United States Joined 4703 days ago 80 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 10 of 15 11 December 2011 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There isn't (please correct if wrong) a native English speaking community in the world that can be in diglossia, the examples of "Ebonics" and your standard tongue are nowhere near the situation of MSA and Levantine Arabic, or of Quebecois and English
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6956 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 11 of 15 12 December 2011 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||
This article explores the relationship of Colloquial Singaporean English functioning as L-variant ("Low") relative to H-variant ("High") of Standard English. The article's abstract is as follows:
Edited by Chung on 12 December 2011 at 1:11am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6382 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 15 12 December 2011 at 8:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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Also (correct if wrong) Carribean English, Indian English and a buttload of African English varieties. Or would you call this Standard English?
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| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5493 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 13 of 15 12 December 2011 at 11:02am | IP Logged | |||||
Good example, Ari. As a native US-English speaker, I could understand probably less than 10% of that. My instinct would be to say someone knows English "diglossically" (does that word even exist?) if they can understand, for example, that video and "General American". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6503 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 15 12 December 2011 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Camundonguinho wrote that only languages can be diglossic, and after a study of a number of sources on the internet I have been convinced that he is right. But the other side of the medal is that if a language has several variant then some may be able to separate them and use each variant consistently, while others mix them up or are limited to one variant.
Diglossia can consist in a language having a high and a low variant, but one complication here is that the high variant may be a written standard. For instance Frenchmen have to learn a written language which differs from the spoken one in many ways. Some Asian languages apparently also have 'polite' variants which differ quite a lot from less informal registers. In this case both are spoken, and I wonder whether they have also different pronunciations - beyond the distinction between slurry and distrinct pronunciation which is very important in for instance Danish. Differences in registermay be so big that the variants almost seem like different languages, but in principle every cultured citizen is expected to master them all - at least passively. Dialects may also be considered as 'high' and 'low', insofar that dialect speakers in some cases are expected also to master an 'official' language variant (which of course also is a dialect, just with higher status and official backing in schools and media). But there the parallel stops: speakers of the 'official' variant are not expected also to speak a dialect, and speakers of one dialect are certainly not expected to speak any other dialect. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6459 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 15 of 15 12 December 2011 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Diglossia is a pretty old phenomenon and the earliest cultures that wrote evolved them both. The culture of
Mesopotamia have always been inhabited by different peoples but they all wrote in Sumerian until Sargon of Akkad united Mesopotamia under his reign — and during that time they used both Sumerian and Akkadian. Thus the language that all scribes, regardless were they sumerian, akkadian, gutéan or kassite, was sumerian. The situation further complicates when Sumerian eventually dies as a spoken language a couple of hundred years after the Sumerian renaissance but remains as a written language and that is written side by side with Akkadian. The latter language freezes and afar a while a scribe either writes in a dead language, Sumerian, or in an old variant of the by-that-time-spoken language. Eventually Aramaic replaced Akkadian as the spoken language and before it was adopted officially, both Sumerian and Akkadian had to be learned from scratch, not both being dead but kept alive in writing. As for Egyptian the language was frozen quite early and for more than a thousands of years they strived to write as they always had done. Endings that had been long lost in the spoken language were repetevily written out. The prestige of the scribe was dependent on the art of writing, and unless that art was something that took time to learn, then the scribes would probably not hold as high status. Japanese before 1945, Written Chinese before the communists, Tibetan, Tamil, Arabic are a couple of more modern examples that I can come up with straight from my head — but were it not for that the English language had evolved so little and not changed grammar or morphology it too would be in a similar situation as can be seen looking at it’s horribly weird orthography. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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