Diglossia and Beyond

Chapter 9 Diglossia and Beyond Jürgen Jaspers Introduction Diglossia in simple terms refers to the use of two varieties in the same society for com- plementary purposes.1 As unassuming as this may sound, the concept can undoubtedly be called one of the grandes dames or, depending on your critical disposition, monstres sacrés of the sociolinguistic stage, against which new, would-be contenders still have to prove themselves, if they ever manage to emulate its success. For although the concept may increasingly be found old- school, politically conservative, and leaving some- thing to be desired in terms of its descriptive and explanatory adequacy, diglossia is still a widely acclaimed celebrity if you keep score of its occurrence in sociolinguistic, language- pedagogical, and linguistic anthropological work. What could be the reasons for this popularity? One obvious reason is that diglossia has been attracting a fair share of criticism in each of these disciplines. But another is certainly that diglossia practicably, in a single term, portrays the sometimes quite widespread and in a number of occasions astoundingly long- standing divisions of labor that obtain between the different varieties, registers, or styles that people produce and recog- nize. Indeed, diglossia alludes to two of the most basic, and therefore also most fascinat- ing, sociolinguistic findings— namely, that people talk and write differently even in the most homogeneous of communities, and that they do so in principled ways that matter to them so much that those who fail to observe these principles have to deal with the consequences (cf. Woolard, 1985: 738). Linguistic divisions of labor, in other words, seem to be an inevitable feature of social life. Claiming in this sense that “[d]iglossia never ends; it is a human universal” (Fasold, 1984: 57) certainly is not entirely off the mark, although such claims are frowned upon by radical diglossia students, as we shall see. A third reason for diglossia’s popularity is that nation-states have invested immensely in institutionalizing linguistic divisions of labor, notably through what we tend to call the “standardization of the national language.” Since this involves distinguishing binary linguistic opposites (a so- called modern national standard versus premodern dialects and 180 Jürgen Jaspers non- national varieties) and assigning different values and functions to them, diglossia has not been inappropriate as a term for referring to the practices and perceptions that orient to this project. In spite of its undeniable fame and practicality, however, I shall be arguing in this chapter that diglossia is not the most felicitous concept for explaining the social use of language. This is because in its predominant sense, diglossia has been used to classify structural outcomes and theorize universal causality principles, leading to a relatively mechanistic social logic and a neglect of the ideological nature of the classified linguistic divisions of labor. Diglossia may be making a fair shot at some sociolinguistic univer- sals, then, but its weapons are seriously blunted. To appreciate how we can go beyond diglossia, we first need to look at where the concept comes from, and how it has been traditionally applied. Historical Perspectives on the Topic Etymologically, “diglossia” derives from the Greek word διγλωσσίας (diglossías), or “bilingualism.” Around the 1880s it became widely adopted by a bourgeois movement of Greek language activists as a term for denouncing what they saw as the national disaster haunting the Greek language, namely its bilingualism. In doing so, these activists were referring to the hard- fought distinction that an intellectual elite (among them, linguists) had been making since the eighteenth century within the Greek language. This was a distinction between, on the one hand, a “purer” version of Greek, called Katharévousa (“puristic language”), which was a deliberately engineered, archaized, officially sanc- tioned, and mostly written variety meant to evoke and reconnect with classical Greek, and, on the other, Dhimotiki (“popular Greek”). The complexity ofKatharévousa effec- tively limited access to the functions for which it was required to an elite who could afford education, and so turned the majority of Greeks into impure speakers. In the wake of other egalitarian movements across Europe, other intellectuals increasingly deplored this linguistic juxtaposition as injurious to the cause of large-scale emancipa- tion, and started to support (and later, codify) Dhimotiki as “the language of the people” that outclassed the “artificial” Katharévousa in terms of speaker numbers, vitality, and authenticity. Supporters of the latter variety naturally did not agree, and consistently stigmatized Dhimotiki as an uncivilized, vulgar idiom, only to find their own efforts of creating “one” language from antiquity until today compromised by Dhimotiki activists as leading to an internal bilingualism (Frangoudaki, 2002: 105). To their unpleas- ant surprise, however, these activists noticed initially that the majority of Greeks were not extremely interested, or could not understand why anyone, least of all the bourgeois activists who often wrote in Katharévousa themselves, wanted to raise the status of a variety they had learned to see as impure, vulgar, and unsuitable for any important busi- ness. Sharing these activists’ frustrations about their initial lack of success, the Franco- Greek philologist Jean Psichari (1854–1929) coined their threat scenario in French Diglossia and Beyond 181 (diglossie) and used it to label the Greek situation somewhat petulantly as a case of “a country that does not want its language” (Psichari, 1929; cf. Tabouret- Keller, 2006). In this way, Psichari recycled an activist term, provocatively applied to an elitist linguistic project, to characterize the entire situation in which this project was developed and denounced. This is not wholly unproblematic— not least for the Greeks, who have had to coin other terms (dimorphia/ diyfia “two forms/ two styles”) to refer to an intralingual differentiation process that outsiders started to identify as an interlingual one (viz. as “diglossic”, thus, bilingual, in Greek) (Frangoudaki, 2002). But also for diglossia studies in general, which have never really transcended the conceptual confusion that results from recursively understanding intralingual divisions of labor through a term borrowed from analogous linguistic divisions of labor at a higher scale (viz., between languages), and then either arguing that intra- and interlingual divisions of labor are essentially a different type (see Hudson and other radicals cited later in this chapter), or reinterpreting the term employed for understanding the intralingual divisions of labor and applying it to the interlingual situation it originated from (see Fishman, discussed later in this section). Psichari in any case referred to the parallel opposition that obtained between classic and vernacular Arabic to relate his appreciation of the Greek situation (1928: 66). This similarity was also noticed by William Marçais (1930), a French educator and expert of Arabic language and literature. Like the Greek language activists, he resented this “diglossia” and compared it to “some kind of two- headed monster” that schools find hard to accommodate, Marçais wryly added, since “they are not made to accommodate monsters” (1930: 409; cited in Sayahi, 2014: 4). Such sentiments bode well for diglossia’s future renown. Its real fame, however, at least from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, was only to come when the American sociolinguist Charles Ferguson (1921–1998) published a much- cited paper about it in Word in 1959. His classic definition is worth repeating here: Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any section of the community for ordinary conversation. (Ferguson, 1959: 336) With hindsight, the sensation of Ferguson’s paper resides in the fact that he combined a discussion of the Greek and Arabic case, and then demonstrated their affinity with a post- colonial case (Standard French vs. Creole in Haiti) and a more recognizably modern one (at least for Ferguson’s readership) concerning the relation between Standard and Swiss German in Switzerland. In doing so, Ferguson not only argued that the intralingual divisions of labor within Greek and Arabic were more widespread than previ- ously assumed, but in one fell swoop also normalized non- Western linguistic practices 182 Jürgen Jaspers while exoticizing Western ones. Slightly simplifying, these four cases— at least until the 1970s2— display a structural similarity: • They distinguish between, and name, a superposed (“H”) and a subjacent (“L”) variety, which largely share the same phonology and lexicon but have a relatively different grammar; • They specialize the functions for H and L, with H only appropriate in one set of functions (such as formal discourse), and L in another (for example, in casual conversation); • The H- and L-variety are “used by some speakers under

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