>
>Diglossia (the condition of having the tongue tied ) is precisely the engine
>of marginalization for NON-dominant tongue beings who cannot easily master the
>means under present educational conditions. But it sure maintains cultural
>continuity!
What is your definition of Diglossia? I was using the pretty standard
(macro) sociolinguistic definition of a situation in which two languages or
dialects are clearly distributed according to functional domains, with each
language in a sense IRREPLACEABLE by the other. The standard examples
(that led to the original elaboration of the description & term) are Arabic
(Koranic/Classical and vernacular varieties) in Marocco, Algeria, Tunisia
(probably more, I don't remember 100%), Guarani & Spanish in Paraguay, and
German & Swissgerman in Switzerland. Let's briefly consider the case I
know best, Swissgerman. There is no earthly reason why Swissgerman should
continue to exist in 1996. It is not a written language, and certainly not
a language of mass communication. Standard German and English take care of
all those print needs. Neither do these "dialects" rank very high on the
prestige meters (everyone agrees Swissgerman is not one of those elegant
latin languages (:-) !) In fact, just like the French speakers in the
country (and the world over), every Swissgerman speaker could simply adopt
the standard variety (which they do tend to speak/write/understand
fluently) to take care of all their communicative needs. The poor little
Swiss school children would no longer struggle with that *&%$# who-is-at standard
variety upon encountering literacy! Problema resuelto. So why do these
stubborn Swissgerman speakers keep at it, then? That was, of course, the
empirical question Ferguson (& Fishman?) asked in the 1960s. The answer:
the good Swiss preferred to sound Swiss rather than German. Identity can
make people kind of stubborn about dialects & accents.
What's interesting to me about diglossia is how stable it is, and how in
diglossic contexts, the "weaker" language has been maintained. You say:
> So does bilingualism (balanced) which opens the doors of choice.
I would agree, and point out that stable diglossia (on the social plane)
requires balanced bilingualism (on the individual plane). What diglossia
"buys" you that balanced bilingualism does not is a host of discourse
activities and a distribution of communicative functions that will maintain
each language. In the Oaxacan high-lands, sociolinguist Aubague has
argued, that is in fact the "ethnolinguistic survival strategy" that
maintained languages with relatively few speakers - certain domains were
ceded to Spanish, others could absolutely NOT be performed or maintained in
Spanish, hence the indigenous language remains to this day. I think if you
try now, say, to use Mixteco for certain print or mass communications, the
lesson of diglossia needs to be considered very seriously. What is going
to provide the "buy in" and generate the socio-material support for Mixteco
print? radio broadcasts? jeopardy?
I think that a language maintenance policy relying on guilt-tripping
bilingual people for always using the dominant language is ... limited.
best,
Genevieve