Diglossia refers to the use by a language community of two languages or dialects, a "high" or "H" variety restricted to certain formal situations, and a "low" or "L" variety for everyday interaction. This article contains a list of nations, cultures, or other communities which sources describe as featuring a diglossic language situation.
Americas
African American Vernacular English In the United States, Standard English is considered H while AAVE is considered L. Its pronunciation is, in some respects, common to Southern American English, which is spoken by many African Americans and many non-African Americans in the United States. Several creolists, including William Stewart, John Dillard, and John Rickford, argue that AAVE shares so many characteristics with creole dialects spoken by black people in much of the world that AAVE itself is a creole, while others maintain that there are no significant parallels. Many African-Americans do not use AAVE, but those who do not are at risk of being criticized about their identity. Additionally, many non-African-Americans use AAVE, depending on where they live and their socioeconomic status.
Brazilian Portuguese
According to some contemporary Brazilian linguists (Bortoni, Kato, Mattos e Silva, Perini and most recently, with great impact, Bagno), Brazilian Portuguese may be a highly diglossic language. This theory claims that there is an L-variant (termed "Brazilian Vernacular"), which would be the mother tongue of all Brazilians, and an H-variant (standard Brazilian Portuguese) acquired through schooling. L-variant represents a simplified form of the language (in terms of grammar, but not of phonetics) that could have evolved from 16th-century Portuguese, influenced by other European, Amerindian (mostly Tupian) and African languages, while H-variant would be based on 19th century European Portuguese (and very similar to Standard European Portuguese, with only minor differences in spelling and grammar usage). Mário A. Perini, a Brazilian linguist, even compares the depth of the differences between L- and H- variants of Brazilian Portuguese with those between Standard Spanish and Standard Portuguese. Milton M. Azevedo wrote a chapter on diglossia in his monography: Portuguese language (A linguistic introduction), published by Cambridge University Press, in 2005, parts of which are available freely on Google books.
Jamaica In Jamaica, everyone is able to speak and understand the vernacular patois (or Patwa), a centuries-old English derived creole. Many also understand and can speak "standard" English; however, in common everyday oral usage, people generally use one or the other exclusively, according to social status and formal education. In everyday commerce, business, banking, media and government—in short, the entire private and public sector—acrolect English is used. This has resulted in a diglossia situation. Situational code-switching, style shifting and code-alternation occur continuously, seamlessly in communication between all Jamaicans of all classes and in all situations, in all speech acts. Recently, Jamaican patois has gone through a process of decreolization, similar to that which happened with AAVE due to the basilect creole variety developing alongside the acrolect English. For all practical purposes, English is Jamaica's native language. When the English took over the country from the Spanish in the seventeenth century Jamaica was linguistically a blank slate. The country came under English jurisdiction and the incoming new colonists were English. English became the de facto language because there was no other language there at the time. The native Arawak (Taino) had long disappeared, and with the arrival of the English in 1655 the few Spanish settlers on the island fled to Cuba. The thousands of West African slaves that would be brought in for labour on the island's notorious sugar plantations of the eighteenth century had not yet arrived. Jamaican patois came into being when the island's burgeoning sugar industry created a large demand for field labour. The incoming African slave labourers—who spoke many various languages themselves—and the English speaking plantocracy communicated through the formation of a contact creole language unique to Jamaica. Today we know this creole as patois, and even those Jamaicans who don't speak it on a daily basis can speak it fluently, and fully understand it. Jamaican patois is sometimes written (in song lyrics, reported speech in books and newspapers for example) but because of the lack of standardization, many words may be spelled in many different ways. Standard English is taught in Jamaican schools, although teachers may speak to pupils and their parents in patois outside of the classroom.
Paraguay In Paraguay, both modern-day Spanish and the Guaraní indigenous language are spoken, and both are official and taught in schools. But a great part of the population speak an informal, barely codified variant of the latter, with many Spanish influences, called Jopará.
Peru In Peru, as throughout most of Latin America, Spanish is considered the 'H' language while indigenous languages like Quechua dialects or Ayamara are considered the 'L' language. This has resulted in most Peruvians who do speak an indigenous language using Spanish more and more in everyday life.
Africa and Asia
Bengali Traditionally, Bengali exhibits diglossia in both written and spoken forms of the language's uppermost registers. Shadhubhasha (সাধু shadhu = 'chaste' or 'sage'; ভাষা bhasha = 'language') exhibited longer verb inflections and heavily Sanskritized vocabulary. Up to the turn of the 19th century, most Bengali literature took this form. Cholitbhasha (চলতিভাষা ) or Cholitobhasha (চলিত cholito = 'current' or 'running'), based on the formal registers of spoken, educated dialects, has much simpler grammatical forms, and has become the modern literary standard.
Burmese Burmese is a diglossic language with two distinguishable registers (or diglossic varieties):
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
