Diglossia As A Special Case Of Register Variation

Abstract

Abstract The three basic premises upon which the following discussion of diglossia is founded may be stated at the very outset. First, diglossia, in its original and most theoretically productive sense, is a dramatic instance of the apparently universal opposition between formal and informal language use. Second, the situational differentiation of registers of the same language is not of the same order as the asymmetric functional allocation of distinct languages within the same speech community, but rather differs from the latter in terms of its sociogenesis and evolutionary course of development. Third, and following from the first two premises, the phenomenon of diglossia is more fruitfully investigated from the perspective of a theory of formal language use and formal social behavior generally than from the perspective of a theory of language contact and societal bilingualism. Two largely independent views of the notion of formality predominate among students of language use in social context, the first an anthropological, or sociocultural, view, and the second a discourse-functional, or psychopragmatic, view. From the anthropological standpoint, formality of discourse is typically viewed in terms of ‘a prevailing affective tone,’ such as seriousness, politeness, or respect (Irvine 1984:212). Within the more psycholinguistic framework of discourse pragmatics, however, formal-informal variation in linguistic form is understood in terms of the interaction between the physical and psychological exigencies of the communicative context, on the one hand, and the cognitive mechanisms engaged in the planning, production, and processing of discourse, on the other (Given 1979:105-06).