Diglossia and Beyond

Chapter 9

Jürgen Jaspers

Introduction

Diglossia in simple terms refers to the use of two varieties in the same society for complementary 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

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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 business. Sharing these activists’ frustrations about their initial lack of success, the Franco- Greek philologist Jean Psichari (1854–1929) coined their threat scenario in French

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(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 previously assumed, but in one fell swoop also normalized non-Western linguistic practices

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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 different conditions” (Ferguson, 1959: 325): all speakers usually acquire the L-variety, but only an intellectual elite goes on to learn, and then use, the H-variety in specific settings; • A large group of speakers shares the perception that H and L are complementary; • They are relatively stable, meaning that the H- and L-variety in each context have had this status for a number of generations: “evidence […] seems to show that it can last well over a thousand years” (Ferguson, 1959: 332).

In this view, diglossia, without a hint of petulance, pertains to divisions of labor in a single diasystem, or to a type of bidialectism, where “the high is spoken by an elite as a second language” (Eckert, 1980: 1054). Ferguson explicitly stated that he made “no attempt […] to examine the analogous situation where two distinct (related or unrelated) languages are used side by side throughout a speech community, each with a clearly defined role)” (1959: 326). Given the conceptual difficulties this may sow (see earlier discussion), his hesitation is understandable. Yet because what ‘distinct’ or ‘similar’ languages are depends not simply on objective correspondence but on speaker judgments, an explanation of this analogous situation is hard to avoid.. This is precisely where Joshua Fishman (1926–2015), the other great popularizer of diglossia, opened the door far wider, suggesting in a short and persuasive article that “bilingualism” be reserved for individuals’ linguistic versatility, and “diglossia” for widespread norms governing the differential allocation of codes across functions, regardless of these codes’ genetic relationship (Fishman, 1967). Fishman thus pushed the door so far open that Ferguson saw his concept fundamentally refashioned and his cases classified as exceptional since they only involve one rather than two languages. Crucial to understanding this unhesitant refashioning of diglossia is that Fishman was highly concerned with protecting indigenous and minority languages. This concern was not untimely, as in the 1950s and 1960s many industrializing nation-states saw the detrimen- tal impact of linguistic standardization on national minority varieties and traditional vernaculars, while these states’ colonization of other regions created linguistic hierar- chies that usually did not augur well for indigenous varieties. Decolonization at the same time created language-planning opportunities in favor of indigenous varieties, although the colonizer language typically remained an H-variety. Highly attracted by the stability that Ferguson attributed to diglossia, Fishman argued that if each language had its own exclusive domain, “its own space, in which it and it alone is normatively expected”

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Table 9.1 The Relationships between Bilingualism and Diglossia Diglossia + Diglossia –

Bilingualism + 1. Both diglossia and bilingualism 2. Bilingualism without diglossia Bilingualism – 3. Diglossia without bilingualism 4. Neither diglossia nor bilingualism

Source: Fishman (1967: 30).

(Fishman, 1991: 85), they could exist side by side. Believing this would be beneficial for the L-variety, he thus sought to create the exact conditions that Psichari, Marçais, and the Greek language activists so deeply deplored! Table 9.1 shows the famous matrix that he developed for arguing his case, listing the different combinations in which diglossia and bilingualism can occur (Fishman, 1967: 30). Fishman clarified these quadrants as follows. Quadrant 1 (“diglossia and bilingualism”) pertains to societies consisting of a majority of bilinguals who use each language in different domains—Paraguay, and the differential use of Spanish and Guaraní there, is taken as a case in point. Quadrant 3 (“diglossia without bilingualism”) refers to those situations where “two or more speech communities are united religiously, politically or economically into a single functioning unit” (Fishman, 1967: 33) but find themselves “locked into opposite extremes on the social spectrum” (1967: 34), as for example with European elites versus the peoples they colonized. Here, the diglossic aspect resides in the fact that the elite’s language usually functions as the H-variety while the non-elites’ language is relegated to L-status. Note that in this case there is no necessary agreement on the functional distribution of the languages involved, which was a crucial condition for Ferguson, and that each group uses its own variety for all purposes (although the elite’s variety fulfills a limited number of official tasks), a reason that some find this -orga nization “pseudo-diglossic” (Britto, 1986; also see Hudson, 2002: 7–8). Quadrant 2 (“bilingualism without diglossia”) is Fishman’s danger category. It com- prises bilingual language use in “circumstances of rapid social change, of great social unrest, of widespread abandonment of prior norms before the consolidation of new ones” (1967: 34–35). This is said to happen whenever a quadrant 3 situation collapses, for example when L-speakers stand up for language rights or appropriate the H-variety. But it can also occur more or less out of sight, in the personal lives of “[d]islocated‌ immigrants and their children […] [who] are particularly inclined to use their mother tongue and other tongue for intragroup communication in seemingly random fashion” (1967: 35). As a result of this, “[l]anguages and varieties formerly kept apart come to influence each other phonetically, lexically, semantically and even grammatically much more than before,” leading to “fused varieties” (1967: 36). Fishman does not con- sider such processes opportune, and argues that they can be attributed to the absence of diglossia: “[w]ithout separate though complementary norms and values to establish and maintain functional separation of the speech varieties, that language or variety which is fortunate enough to be associated with the predominant drift of social forces tends to

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displace the other(s)” (1967: 36). Quadrant 4, finally, is only theoretically possible and tends to be “self-liquidating” (1967: 37): it hypothesizes the existence of entirely homogeneous or thus nonhuman speech communities. Fishman’s extension of diglossia’s scope and its relevance to language maintenance fueled its fame in subsequent decades and caused a taxonomic frenzy. Since then, mod- erates and radicals clash over what may be called genuinely diglossic or not. The for- mer classify Ferguson’s and Fishman’s conceptualizations respectively as “endo”- and “exoglossia,” “genetic” and “non-genetic” diglossia, “narrow” and “broad” diglossia, or “restricted” and “extended” diglossia (see, among others, Fasold, 1984). The latter accuse Fishman of stretching the concept and obscuring two intrinsically different phenomena in terms of their development; to wit, “diglossia,” where the L-variety gradually replaces an outdated H-variety, as in the rare set of cases discussed by Ferguson, and “societal bilingualism” (or “biglossia”), where it is the H-variety that usually supplants its L-counterpart, as Fishman indicated (Hudson, 2002; Paulston, 2002; Sayahi, 2014). Clearly, though, diglossia has been an irrevocably stretched notion from the start, its use born out of a comparison between inter- and intralingual divisions of labor—not to mention that in this radical view diglossia and societal bilingualism can only be identified post hoc, when L is standardized or H has disappeared (Haas, 2002: 111). Other authors compared Fishman’s matrix with their own data and realized that the binary opposition that diglossia implied was unsustainable, leading to other prefixed glossias. Thus, Timm (1981) suggested that Fishman’s “interlanguage diglossia” actually contained several Fergusonian “intralanguage diglossias” for each of the languages involved. Others have suggested a “triglossia” or a “double-overlapping diglossia” (Fasold, 1984: 44–45) involving three rather than two levels—namely, a basilect (L), mesolect (M), and acrolect (H), such as in Tanzania, where Mkilifi (1978) showed that Swahili for educated speakers functioned as an acrolect vis-à-vis various Tanzanian vernaculars but at the same time as a basilect vis-à- vis English. Ennaji and Sadiqi (1994) discuss the “quadriglossia” existing in the Maghreb and the Arab world in general, where Classical Arabic occurs in religion, official speeches and poetry, Standard Arabic in scientific, political and administrative discourse, Vernacular Arabic in informal settings, in addition to an elevated colloquial or “Educated Spoken Arabic” that is used for mediated spoken interaction.3 The description of a “double-nested diglossia” has been attributed to Gumperz (1964; Fasold, 1984: 46): in the Indian village of Khalapur, Hindi and the local dialect were H and L, respectively, but each appeared to consist of a higher and lower variety. On the basis of his work among English-educated Chinese speakers in Singapore and Malaysia, Platt (1977) suggested a linear “polyglossia” containing one or more acrolects, one or more mesolects, and one or more basilects. Calvet (2006) prefers “schizoglossia” for the Arabic situation, a term he borrows from Haugen (1962), who applied it to the linguistically insecure in a diglossic world. Recently, Saxena (2014) juxtaposes “critical” and “lifestyle” diglossia, while García (2013) suggests “transglossia.” I will return to these latter terms in the “Perspectives for the Future” section of this chapter. This is far from the full list of glossias that have been proposed. Attentive readers will have noticed that “heteroglossia” has been left unmentioned, as are the various terms

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proposed for the functional allocation of different writing systems (such as “digraphia,” “trigraphia,” etc.). It has indeed become crowded on the sociolinguistic stage, where once diglossia starred solely; for this reason, we will now focus on the concept’s essential contributions to the study of language and society, on the problems its use has engen- dered, and on how we can avoid a cacaphonic choir of old and new glossias.

Core Issues and Topics in the Present

Quintessentially, diglossia has been used to draw attention to the fact that people routinely associate ways of speaking with typical settings, activities, and social personae; and to the fact that these ways of speaking, as well as the settings, activities, and people with which they are associated, are differentially valued (they come in “higher” and “lower” versions). This is, in principle, not unlike what we now often call “processes of enregisterment,” that is, the “social regularity of recognition whereby linguistic (and accompanying nonlinguistic) signs come to be recognized as indexing pragmatic fea- tures of interpersonal role (persona) and relationship” (Agha, 2005: 57), in line with circulating discourses on appropriate behavior. There are important differences despite this superficial similarity, however. This is mostly because diglossia studies have been preoccupied with classifying and naming the X-glossic characteristics of particular sociolinguistic situations, and with identifying universal patterns of causality (cf. Kulick, 1992: 9). This has given an important impetus to the exploration of sociolinguistic arrangements across the globe. But it has revealed relatively little about how and why conditions described as diglossic (or triglossic, etc.) emerge, develop, and dissolve. And as a result of this taxonomic interest, diglossia studies have mostly been satisfied with (1) a mechanistic social logic and (2) an agnostic view of the ideological nature of the classified sociolinguistic arrangements. Taking these problems in turn, the mechanistic social logic that diglossia entails resides in the idea that norms depend on strict observance of domain-variety correspondences (in other words, rigorous code compartmentalization), and that if such norms exist, speakers will follow them. Failure to observe domain-variety correspondence is typically described in diglossia studies as a “serious social gaffe” (Fasold, 1984: 35) or as an omen of impending language shift, that is, as an indication of “leaky diglossia” where “one variety ‘leaks’ into the functions formerly reserved for the other” (Fasold, 1984: 34) and eventually causes “fused varieties” or the “abandonment of prior norms before the consolidation of new ones” (Fishman, 1967: 34–35). Apart from the empirical evidence testifying to normative linguistic heterogeneity (Canagarajah, 2013), however, human models of behavior never play out so strictly as diglossia studies require. This means that the “leaking” that speakers produce is not quite so quickly perceived as blundering or even as antithetical to the traditional function or domain of use that varieties have, and that conventional correspondences are less determining of actual linguistic choices.

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To understand this, it is necessary to see that what is normative for humans depends not on observable co-occurrences but on their reflexive practices. Simply put, what humans find normative they must see and demonstrate to be so. With regard to conventional language use, Agha explains that when humans use linguistic and other sign forms, they make “social relations construable as effects of their occurrence” (2007: 15). He argues that some of these are “emergent,” one-off effects that create a particular, highly local, alignment between participants. But other effects become stereotypical and hold across encounters through enregisterment processes, that is, reflexive practices through which linguistic and nonlinguistic signs are socially typified into differently valued ways of speaking or interactional models (“registers,” “styles”). These interactional models consequently constrain the selection of sign forms in specific instances of use and so create the divisions of labor that are basic to the phenomena diglossia students describe. At the same time, each model needs to be actualized, that is, re-enacted in interaction, and for its continued existence depends on reflexive activity that reproduces its stereotypical effects, or that reanalyze (so, reinterpret) the model to produce a highly local one-off effect, which may in its turn become stereotypical if others repeat that reanalysis. The reflexive practices through which these models come into being, and are reproduced or reanalyzed, range from relatively explicit metapragmatic acts (“this is street language,” “was that polite, hm?” “pupils must refrain from mixing languages” “she sounded terribly high-handed”), to more or less implicit metapragmatic typifications such as the routinely ratified use of particular sign forms in specific -cir cumstances and various acts in which voices “leak” from one domain into another, to which I will now turn. That leaking can be meaningful and even dependent on norm observance was already observed by Blom and Gumperz (1972) in their investigation of language use in Hemnesberget, a small Norwegian village. At first sight, their observations illustrated “how diglossia works”: some locals alternated codes (later called “situational code- switching”; Gumperz, 1982: 60–61), that is, switched from Ranamål, their Norwegian dialect, to standard Bokmål (“book speech”) to symbolically underline a changed set- ting and the different speaking rights and obligations this occasions. Teachers shifted, for example, from lecturing in Bokmål, a largely monologic event, to the use of dialect to indicate that the situation was now more allowing for the self-selected turns needed for an open discussion. These code selections were relatively stable, and governed by “rules of etiquette that […] are often explicitly taught” while “breaches [could] evoke overt comment” (Gumperz, 1982: 61; Blom and Gumperz, 1972: 424). Blom and Gumperz soon concluded, however, that “language choice is never completely deter- mined” (1972: 424) after noticing that some informants, who knew each other as fellow residents, were switching from H to L and back repeatedly in the local administration office, arguably an H-situation. Rather than explaining these acts as bloopers or as the precursors of a large-scale language shift, they argued that such code selections modu- lated or “keyed” (Goffman, 1974: 40ff.) the interaction as it moved from a formal tone of voice, in which to discuss business, to a more relaxed one to inquire about family affairs. Later called “metaphorical code-switching” (Gumperz, 1982: 61), Hemnesberget locals

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actually “troped” on existing models for interaction (Agha, 2007: 24–25): they inserted linguistic sign forms (local dialect) that were incongruent with the conventional interactional model for H-contexts (viz., the use of Bokmål, politeness formulae, para- and nonlinguistic signs that flag politeness) and so made “other discursive personae …[ ] recognizable through speech […] [and] intelligible to those acquainted with [them]” (Agha, 2007: 142). Using dialect forms, in other words, signaled a less formal persona, and so briefly changed participants’ footing in the situation at hand. In this sense, Hemnesberget locals were maintaining an orientation to two simultaneous models of interaction. Such interpersonal effects cannot be explained, or are explained only as non-normative, when norms require speakers’ absolute obedience. These effects also illustrate two larger points that interactional sociolinguists have been making: namely, that people create contexts for producing signs, rather than fol- lowing conventions in mechanical fashion (cf. Martin-Jones, 1989: 123), and that “what a situation is” is not a singular happening (“ah, it’s an L-situation, so I’ll use the L-variety”) but depends on constant negotiation between interactants, who reflexively infer from each others’ use of signs what context will be relevant for continued sign production (Gumperz, 1982; Jaspers, 2011a). The Hemnesberget locals would have made a genuine social mistake, in other words, had they not picked up on their fellow residents’ succes- sive hints for the type of social relation they hoped to create but decided to stick to a uni- lateral, one-off, definition of the situation as H. Such a view on interaction also means that the production of linguistic signs conventionally belonging to a variety can never be taken at face value or never provides more than a primary sketch of the potentially relevant context (Agha, 2007: 14). Linguistic signs never walk unaccompanied, after all, but operate, so to say, in semiotic teams where they are continuously flanked by para- and nonlinguistic signs (such as tone of voice, pitch, intonation, posture, gestures, or clothing). Depending on the precise composition of such teams, the production of signs customarily seen as belonging to a variety recognized as formal can be read as a genuine attempt to install a formal model of conduct (when these linguistic signs are confirmed by other signs that usually index formality), or rather, as a halfhearted, ironic, or sarcas- tic contribution. Interaction analysis is thus crucial for any account of what sign forms mean on specific occasions of use, despite how they have come to be stereotyped in earlier interaction or represented in etiquette manuals. Other examples of reflexive practices where the interactional effects “depend on the performance of an incorrect identity” (Agha, 2007: 138) are imitations, responding in a reciprocal voice, or what has been labeled as “crossing” and “stylization” (Coupland, 2007; Rampton, 2006). All of these practices involve the use of a voice that is incongruent with the speaker or situation, which not only creates rhetorical effect in the speech event of its occurrence, but at the same time also (re)associates the evoked voice with the social personae and relationships that are at issue. So using a posh voice that dif- fers from one’s usual way of speaking can indicate an ironic stance, which at the same time it reproduces the social quality of a posh voice as overly pretentious, unemotional, and so on. The typification of an varietyH- as H, then, also happens through its recur- rent meaningful use in conventional L-situations, and vice versa (good examples are

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provided by Chun, 2009; Madsen, 2013; Rampton, 2006; Snell, 2010). “Leaking” is thus at least partly conditional on the social existence of what people (learn to) see as different styles or varieties, and demonstrates that “instead of passively observing idealized norms of language allocation,” interactants’ sign production “actively contribut[es] to the definition and redefinition of the symbolic value of languages within the community repertoire” (Martin-Jones, 1989: 114). Rigorous code compartmentalization is thus not required for maintaining domain- variety correspondences. Neither are such correspondences, despite Fishman’s con- viction, a guarantee for preventing language shift (Hudson, 2002). Eckert (1980) demonstrated, for example, in describing the imposition of French on speakers of Gascon in southwestern France, that Gascon eventually atrophied in relation to French in the period of only a few generations, despite their diglossic relation. Gascon gradually came to be associated with all that contradicted knowledge, progress, common sense, and access to white-collar work—in sum, civilization. Eckert concluded that diglossia in this case “create[d]‌ a situation in which one language [had to] disappear for the community to retain a positive self-image” (1980: 1062). If so, the question of why other divisions of labor described as diglossic endure and others evolve differently in spite of their structural similarity to the Gascon-French case becomes insistent. Eckert’s hint at a community’s self-image may provide a way out of the taxonomic trap because it draws attention to how people reflexively understand themselves and the world around them. Indeed, as Kulick (1992: 9) argues, “[s]ocial changes such as urbanization or industrialization may lead people to revise their perceptions of themselves and their world,” and this may lead people to shift their language. But the point is that “this is not necessary or predictable” because it depends on how such perceptions “are encoded by and mediated through language” (Kulick, 1992: 9). What matters is not code compartmentalization or social changes per se, but how speakers evaluate their linguistic resources, and the diglossic arrangement itself, in relation to these changes. While giving up Gascon seemed logi- cal for its speakers, this has been unthinkable for speakers of Swiss German in relation to Standard German, who have come to ideologize the differential use of these varieties as a perfect marriage between local identity and economic internationalism. Yet the stability of this arrangement remains vulnerable for Swiss Germans’ evolving judgments: changing perceptions of mainstream media entertainment or appropriate teach- ing methods, for example, lead to an increased use of Swiss German in domains where Standard German used to predominate (Haas, 2002). Given that diglossia studies have been preoccupied with structural outcomes and universal causality principles, we can see why local perceptions have not been high on the agenda. This preoccupation also explains the lack of attention to the ideological nature of sociolinguistic arrangements. To be sure, another major reason that diglossia’s stardom is fading has to do with its agnostic or apolitical character: it distinguishes observable divisions of labor between an H- and L-variety, but treats these, as Bruno Latour (2004) would say, as “matters of fact” rather than “matters of concern.” In the last three to four decades, however, Latour and other poststructuralist authors (such as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and others) have insisted on the power-saturated nature of structures, viewpoints, and

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ideas formerly presented as neutral, true, received, or appropriate, such as literary can- ons, science, progress, or modernity. Correspondingly, “evident” divisions of linguistic labor came under attack for their contribution to unequally organized social relations, as were the scientific concepts, such as diglossia, that named these divisions while iron- ing out the conflict behind what presented itself as a fact. Ferguson was thus certainly right to observe that the “superposed variety […] is learned largely by formal education” (1959: 336), but at the same time failed to mention that this turns the H-variety into a desirable commodity that serves as an instrument of distinction from those who have failed to acquire it (cf. Bourdieu, 1991). Merely observing that H is H and L is L, in other words, falls short of explaining how these varieties came to be H or L in the first place: it acknowledges their complementarity, but disregards their implication in a social struggle over what counts as appropriate or best language use in unequally organized, imag- ined speech communities (García, 2013; Martin-Jones, 1989; Tabouret-Keller, 2006; Williams, 1992). L-speakers, after all, never stood up to claim their L-status, just as other divisions of labor (between men and women, whites and non-whites, straight and queer people) are not quite as simply accepted as a matter of fact. The stability that diglossia in a number of cases exemplified, which Fishman was so attracted by, “is [thus] dependent on rigid social stratification” (Eckert, 1980: 1054). Fishman later tried to meet some of these objections by replacing H and L with “unthreatened” and “threatened,” respectively (1991). But this avoids the question of how ways of speaking come to be hierarchized, rather than explaining it. This is all the more problematic when we know that a good deal of the divisions of labor that have been labeled diglossic answer to the requirements of “metadiscursive regimes,” that is, representations of language and its organization that have become more widespread, often through their mobilization in various institutional (administrative, educational, religious) discourses (cf. Agha, 2007: 130). As Bauman and Briggs (2003) explain, one of the most successful metadiscursive regimes worldwide is the so-called standardization of the national language: it projects a pure and modern “language” to be used in science, education, politics, and public discourse, and juxtaposes it with as-of- then premodern “dialects” that are suspect for their ambiguity and vulgarity in the previously mentioned domains but that can be appreciated for their authenticity in, say, the family home. Such a regime leaves little doubt about how it values both ways of speaking, their preferred place of occurrence, or about the constant necessity of keeping these ways of speaking maximally separate. Indeed, it proposes a division of linguistic labor that Greek activists in the nineteenth century would have called unacceptably diglossic. Contra the previously mentioned radicals, such a regime is quite applicable to cases of societal bi- or multilingualism, since such cases are often viewed through the standard-dialect lens, with the national standard language at one end, and what are typically identified as “mere dialects of another language” or as “not even a language” at the other. Clearly, too, such regimes work to underline and legitimize inequalities depending on people’s iden- tifiability as speakers of H or L, and operate in a world where some will have a stake in limiting access to H. Sociolinguists failing to take such regimes into account while using diglossia to name divisions of labor that orient to them not only overlook an important

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part of the explanation for these divisions, but also sweep under the carpet their con- tested nature. They also, in Calvet’s words, “freeze around two poles” (2006: 197) a diversity of linguistic practices through accepting the regime’s bipolar simplification of a complex linguistic ecology (see also Dorian, 2002) as well as its other inventions, namely that there exist separate, countable languages, and that speaking or writing them is a monoglossic affair. This has become difficult to maintain in a “late modern” world, where the metadiscursive assumptions of linguistic standardization are critically inspected by more and more sociolinguists and anthropologists, and where an array of major changes, subsum- able under “the new global economy,” have encouraged intensely heteroglossic communication patterns both within and between what are usually seen as separate languages and communities. Based on these insights, there has been a growing interest in concepts that incorporate a critical outlook on linguistic divisions of labor, and in practices that defy a compartmentalized view on language use. I will now discuss to what extent these interests offer useful frames of reference for the future.

Perspectives for the Future

Some authors have recently suggested terms that are meant to capture the concerns raised in the previous sections. Hence García (2013) suggests “transglossia,” which “rests on, but goes beyond […] [Bakhtin’s] heteroglossia” (2013: 160) because of its critical nature. It “refers to the fluid language practices that question traditional descriptions based on national myths,” and “releases [subaltern] ways of speaking.” In this way, García catches two birds with one stone: through attending to translingual, or heteroglossic, practices, she sets out to demonstrate that these can throw existing inequalities into critical relief—when they do so, García speaks of “transglossia.” In a similar vein, Saxena (2014) proposes “critical diglossia” and sets it apart from “lifestyle diglossia.” Critical diglossia “contends that diglossia is primarily a socio-cultural, economic, and political phenomenon which is not necessarily accepted as a natural state of affairs by all the minority groups and individuals. Such a conceptualization, therefore, invokes the agency besides the structural dimension” (Saxena, 2014: 94). Lifestyle diglossia in its turn is proposed to capture this agentive aspect and to draw attention to how people actively and linguistically encode “their group affiliations and individuality by drawing on the global flows of lifestyles and local structural arrangements (2014: 111), with even- tual mixing as a result. Such concepts usefully call attention to the ideological character of existing linguistic divisions of labor, to speakers’ agentive capacity, and to the existence of a whole range of hybrid linguistic practices that a diglossic approach usually would dismiss as undesir- able leakage or temporary norm chaos. Other authors have similarly emphasized the existence of “polylingual” (Jørgensen, 2008), “metrolingual” (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010), “heteroglossic,” and “translingual” (Canagarajah, 2013; Creese and Blackledge,

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2011) practices. There have been parallel accounts of “diaglossic” (Auer, 2005) behavior language internally, in the wake of the growing popularity of language use that is not entirely dialectal or standard-like, most notably in domains traditionally defined as exclusively standard, such as audiovisual media or the school (see, among others, Coupland, 2014; Jaspers and Van Hoof, 2015). Yet, whether translingual or diaglossic practices “question traditional descriptions” or “release subaltern ways of speaking” remains principally an empirical question. García’s own analysis reveals that translingual practices at school can be subservient to teach- ing pupils how to keep particular school languages (such as English and Spanish) separate and avoid producing translingual practices in contexts where this is frowned upon (2013: 164–171). Other studies demonstrate that while translingual practices can allevi- ate some of the friction emerging from the conflict between monolingual policies and heteroglossic audiences, such practices do not necessarily question or impact on policies (Creese and Blackledge, 2011; Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010; Stæhr and Madsen 2015). Jaspers (2014, 2015) likewise describes how the well-appreciated occurrence of translingual practices in the margins of official activity at school, and their association with particular topics, stances, and social personae, can typify such practices as exceptional and relatively unimportant in comparison to the monoglossic practices the curriculum approves—not to mention that an agentive, critical attitude toward standard language expectations does not prevent those who display this attitude from invoking and legiti- mizing these same expectations to distinguish themselves from others (Jaspers, 2011b). In short, transglossia and critical diglossia draw attention to an important side of sociolinguistic arrangements, but it is in our interest to understand the occurrence and development of critical and noncritical practices alike, regardless of their desirability. Rather than adding to what is by now a dissonant choir of prefixed glossias, moreover, and so adding further grist to the taxonomic mill, it will be advantageous to recruit other concepts. Agha’s “enregisterment” (2007) certainly is a valuable alternative, as indicated earlier. “Styling” is equally useful, if it implicates a similar focus on the social effects and reflexive typification of sign forms in interaction (cf. Coupland, 2007; Eckert, 2008). Both concepts, and the theories behind them, go beyond the taxonomic approach in diglossia studies in that they insist that the emergence and maintenance of semiotic divisions of labor must and can be explained as an ongoing sociocultural process, notably through investigating observable, moment-by-moment unfolding interaction where reflexive practices typify, and consequently mold, sets of linguistic and nonlinguistic sign forms into differentiable (intra- or interlingual) registers, styles, or interactional models. These concepts can furthermore serve to explain the development and (in)stability of semiotic divisions of labor that diglossia studies struggle with, through drawing attention to registers’ career or “social life” (Agha, 2007)—that is, their relation to other registers, their growth or decline in terms of an audience that recognizes and ratifies them, and the degree of their institutionalization. Human societies display a dazzling amount of different registers or styles (talking like a hip-hopper, a teacher, a TV cook, a pop star, a president, and so on). But these are far from equally valued since they emerge in a world where cultural metadiscourses circulate about appropriateness,

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educatedness, beauty, modernity, piety, coolness, and so on, as a result of which registers are associated with specific social positions. These associations accordingly impact on a particular register’s renown, and influence its uptake or ratification by others. Some registers even come to be promoted as exemplary for all and are canonized as the standard for whole societies through the mass circulation of their social value via mass media and their institutionalization in the metadiscursive practices of schooling, religion, or state administration. Such representations of a particular register can naturally invite a relatively stable division of labor between the promoted standard, on the one hand, and an array of nonstandard registers, on the other, that uncareful analysis might subsume under one single “L-variety” heading. Even so, standards and metadiscursive regimes are not immune to contestation, grad- ual erosion, and disappearance, since they constantly depend on their actualization in interactions where speakers at each moment may orient to expected models of interaction, ratify others, or reanalyze existing ones. Note in this frame the changing reputa- tion of Received Pronunciation or “posh,” the vernacularization trends in mainstream media (Coupland, 2014; Mugglestone, 2003), or the relative attractiveness of heteroglossic “contemporary urban vernaculars” (Rampton, 2011). It will be interesting to see how positive valorizations of linguistic practices conventionally perceived as uneducated but increasingly appreciated as unpretentious may gain such a discursive foothold that they start challenging and possibly replacing more established registers. The language policy briefs that many nation-states have been developing in recent years, however, are bound to offer a strongly competitive, that is negative, valorization of these practices as they try, in diglossic fashion, to secure these outside of cherished discursive spaces and suggest language separation as the bedrock of national pride and profit (Heller and Duchêne, 2012). So any serious change in the organization of registers will often require signifi- cant political and ideological changes. This explains why even dead registers (such as classical Arabic), which according to diglossic taxonomies should long since have made way for a new demotic standard, can be so politically and religiously entrenched that even widespread national vernaculars and oralized written registers typified as educated (“Modern Standard Arabic”) continue to be rejected as canonical (cf. Calvet, 2006: 198). It is equally clear that the potential anchoring of translingual behavior in more important social spaces than today may well invite its uncritical recruitment for those wishing to distinguish themselves from others speaking “too monolingually.” Observing translingual behavior, in other words, does not excuse us from investigating with which cultural values it is associated, how these representations circulate in the public sphere, are set off from other ways of speaking, and are possibly naturalized as exemplary for all. Long-standing semiotic divisions of labor may thus crumble, but new divisions always emerge in the societies that people construe. Students of language and society can play an important role by showing how different registers emerge in and have to be (re)produced in the fleeting detail of everyday interaction, and how these depend on metadiscursive regimes that distinguish suitable from unsuitable behavior, affecting those whose behavior is represented as such.

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Concluding Remarks and Review of Key Points

Diglossia is one of the world-conquering concepts that the study of language and society has produced. Provocatively applied by Greek language activists to denounce a linguistic purification regime as leading to a language-internal bilingualism (diglossia in Greek), the term was later scientifically recycled to characterize the Greek situation in general. Ferguson consequently applied “diglossia” to arrangements that were similar in their complementary use of two different registers of (what speakers view as) the same language, regardless of speakers’ metalinguistic opinions, before Fishman extended the concept’s scope to the bilingual situations that originally inspired its use, through reinterpreting diglossia as the differential allocation of codes across functions, irrespective of these codes’ genetic relationship. Stimulated by Ferguson’s and Fishman’s insights, the interest in diglossia has been extremely productive, leading to the exploration of sociolinguistic arrangements across the globe, both synchronically and diachronically. But by and large these efforts have failed to provide convincing explanations for the linguistic divisions of labor that diglossia has been used to name. As we have seen, diglossia studies have been preoccupied with structural outcomes and universal causality patterns, and this has involved a mechanistic social logic, as it also made opaque the sometimes intense social struggle behind the ways of speaking described as functioning complementarily. So although diglossia is perhaps useful as a broad appreciation of them, the closer we get to actual semiotic processes that involve language, and the more we wish to know about their historical emergence, development, and change, the more obfuscating the concept becomes. Nevertheless, even if diglossia’s make-up may be flaking, it is not undeserving of its fame for accentuating the basic fact that people systematically distinguish, and are attached to, different semiotic styles, registers, or ways of speaking for the social work they have to do. We would be unwise, therefore, in light of the growing attention to heteroglossic language use and the need for a critical perspective, to throw out diglossia’s essential contribution with the conceptual bathwater, and thus forgo the opportu- nity of investigating what new semiotic divisions of labor emerge and grow under the influence of new, expanding metacultural discourses, and which older metadiscursive regimes are more or less successfully braving these. The recent interest in enregisterment and styling can in this sense help us to explore how also heteroglossic language use, just as its monoglossic counterpart, is reflexively enregistered, that is, socially typified, named, set off from other ways of speaking, and anchored in social space by rival value judgments, so that we can appreciate how, and also with what potentially uncritical effect, humans recruit it for evoking and shaping their relations with one another.

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Notes

1. The author thanks Lian Malai Madsen, Sarah Van Hoof, and the editors of this volume for their excellent comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter. 2. Dhimotiki was made the official Greek language in 1976. 3. Not to forget the use of Berber varieties in the Maghreb.

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