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,William A. Stewart, Non-standard Speech and the Teaching of English (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics), 1964; William A. Stewart, "On the use of Negro dialect in the teaching of reading", in Joan Baratz, ed., Teaching Black Children to Read (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969) pp. 156-219; J. L. Dillard, Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (New York: Random House, 1972); John R. Rickford, "Prior creolization of AAVE? Sociohistorical and textual evidence from the 17th and 18th centuries", Journal of Sociolinguistics 1 (1997): 315-336; all as cited in Salikoko Mufwene, "What is African American English?", and Guy Bailey, "The relationship between African American Vernacular English and White Vernaculars in the American South: A sociocultural history and some phonological evidence", both in Sonja Lanehart, ed., Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, Varieties of English around the World (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001). while others maintain that there are no significant parallels.The Oakland school board's resolution "was about a perfectly ordinary variety of English spoken by a large and diverse population of Americans of African descent. . . . [E]ssentially all linguists agree that what the Oakland board was dealing with is a dialect of English." Many African-Americans do not use AAVE, but those who do not are at risk of being criticized about their identity.Nikolas Coupland. Style: Language Variation and Identity. p. 165 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):
Literary High (H) form ( mranma ca): the high variety (formal and written), used in literature (formal writing), newspapers, radio broadcasts, and formal speeches Spoken Low (L) form ( mranma ca.ka:): the low variety (informal and spoken), used in daily conversation, television, comics and literature (informal writing)
The literary form of Burmese retains archaic and conservative grammatical structures and modifiers (including particles, markers and pronouns) no longer used in the colloquial form. In most cases, the corresponding grammatical markers in the literary and spoken forms are totally unrelated to each other. Examples of this phenomenon include the following lexical items:
"this" (pronoun): i → di "that" (pronoun): htui → hui "at" (postposition): hnai. → hma plural (marker): mya: → twe possessive (marker): i. → re. "and" (conjunction): hnang. → ne. "if" (conjunction): hlyang → rang
Historically the literary register was preferred for written Burmese on the grounds that "the spoken style lacks gravity, authority, dignity". In the mid-1960s some Burmese writers spearheaded efforts to abandon the literary form, asserting that the spoken vernacular form ought to be used. Some Burmese linguists such as Minn Latt, a Czech academic, proposed moving away from the high form of Burmese altogether. Although the literary form is heavily used in written contexts (literary and scholarly works, radio news broadcasts, and novels), the recent trend has been to accommodate the spoken form in informal written contexts. Nowadays, television news broadcasts, comics, and commercial publications use the spoken form or a combination of the spoken and simpler, less ornate formal forms.
Cape Verdean Creole Perhaps one of the oldest creoles in existence, the Kriolu/Crioulu/Kabuverdianu/Caboverdiano of the Cape Verde islands has existed alongside the Portuguese brought by slave traders since the 15th century. Inhabiting the island with slaves brought from all along the West African coast, a pidgin developed to allow for communication both between traders and slaves as well as among slaves of different ethnic groups. Today, Kriolu is used mostly in the home and in casual settings, while Portuguese is the language of government and business. More recently, some events and organizations are beginning to conduct business, conferences, and symposiums in Kriolu, while schools debate to what extent Kriolu should be used in the classrooms. Efficiency and international competency are certainly important to consider when making a choice to use Portuguese or Kriolu in institutional settings, but so is the cultural identity for which Kriolu is so essential to maintain.
Chinese For over two thousand years, the Chinese used Classical Chinese (Literary Chinese) as a formal standard written language. The standard written language served as a bridge for communication throughout China and other Sinosphere countries for millennia.
However, the colloquial varieties of Chinese continued to evolve. The gulf became so wide between the formal written and colloquial spoken languages that it was blamed for hindering education and literacy, and some even went so far as to blame it in part for the political turmoil that occurred in China during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This eventually culminated in the adoption of written vernacular Chinese, which was based on modern spoken Mandarin, for all formal communication.
Modern Chinese After the adoption of vernacular Chinese as the modern standard written language in the early 20th century, diglossia was no longer a big issue among the majority of Chinese speakers who learn Mandarin Chinese as the standard national dialect. However, standard Chinese and its pronunciation in local Chinese language varieties is still a formal register in regions where Mandarin is not spoken natively, such as most of South China.
For instance in Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese is the primary language of spoken communication, although all formal written communication is done in standard written Chinese. Unique among the other Chinese language varieties, Cantonese has its own written form, but it is largely used in informal contexts, such as personal communication, internet slang, advertising, music, and film.