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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 28:2 (2018) ► pp.185–216

Diglossia

A language ideological approach

 | University of Leuven, Belgium
Diglossia is, as far as the Arabic language is concerned, a concept that has been taken for granted, as much as it has been criticized. First, based on Ferguson’s article on diglossia and subsequent interpretations and ramifications of the concept and with a special focus on how language variability is discursively deployed and how it is perceived in the Arab speech community, I will argue that diglossia does not so much describe actual language use, but rather how language variability is ‘read’ in the Arab world. In the second part of the article, an analysis of labeling in a 19th century debate will show how the dichotomy between fuṣḥā and non-fuṣḥā varieties (ʿāmmīya),
which is the basis of diglossia, was already taken for granted long before the concept and the term existed, and even before fuṣḥā and ʿāmmīya were used as independent lexical items. The analysis in both parts of the article shows how much diglossia is taken for granted by most native speakers of Arabic, even if it defies linguistic descriptions of actual language use. It is exactly this ‘common-sense-ness’ that suggests that diglossia is a useful tool to describe language ideological attitudes.
Keywords: diglossia, Arabic, language ideology, language debates, labeling
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Diglossia: A critical approach
    • 2.1A strict functional division between fuṣḥā and ʻāmmīya? The language continuum, intermediate varieties and code-switching
      • 2.1.1The linguistic continuum and intermediate varieties
      • 2.1.2Educated Spoken Arabic (ESA)
      • 2.1.3Code-switching
      • 2.1.4Diglossia, intermediate varieties and the native speaker
      • 2.1.5Diglossia as a set of metapragmatic norms
      • 2.1.6First set of conclusions
    • 2.2Diglossia and linguistic prestige: Standard versus prestige
      • 2.2.1 Lēš tmaddanti?
      • 2.2.2Foreign languages
      • 2.2.3Second set of conclusions
  • 3.Analysis of the Muqtaṭaf debate
    • 3.1Introduction
      • 3.1.1Why the 19th century?
    • 3.2The basic dichotomy: Fuṣḥā and ʻāmmīya
    • 3.3Clusters of associations Al-fuṣḥā and Al-ʻāmmīya: Synonyms and their connotations
      • 3.3.1The process of labeling and synonymy: Indirect equation
      • 3.3.2The process of labeling and synonymy: Direct equation
      • 3.3.3The terms and their connotations: al-luġa ʻāmmīya–luġat al-ʻāmma
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • The corpus (in order of appearance)
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 7 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.00006.dan
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