LANGUAGE IN INDIA

A Case Review of Tamil Diglossia

Alfred J. Matiki, Ph.D.

Introduction

Since Ferguson published his famous paper on diglossia in 1959, a lot of scholars have tried to follow this scholarship by matching a lot of language situations against the principles of diglossia that he laid out. While such scholarship has uncovered numerous other cases of diglossia (dead or alive) in the world, in some cases the principles have been applied to situations and in ways that the original theory did not intend.

Hudson (1994) rightly notes that the term diglossia has acquired a certain degree of ambiguity because of the way it has been used (and misused) by various scholars.

Ferguson (1991) also admits that his theory has probably been misunderstood and, in some cases, the terminology that guided the theory has been extended to cover areas that were not and probably are not in cognizance with the original theory. Ferguson also admits certain weaknesses in his theory.

In the original article, Ferguson (1959:336) defined diglossia as

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 sector of the community for ordinary conversation.

It is clear that this definition is a little too inclusive and no hierarchy of the defining principles of diglossia is evident. It is not clear also as to how many of the nine features should apply for a language situation to qualify as diglossic. As a result of these shortcomings, some scholars have zealously applied these principles and diglossified situations that could appropriately be analyzed within the framework of colonial language situations or bilingualism. For instance, Fishman (1977) looks at the relationship between English (or French) and various vernaculars in post colonial areas as constituting diglossic situations.

Recent Work on Diglossia

Recent work on diglossia (see Hudson 1991, Hudson-Edwards 1984, Schiffman 1991, Britto 1991, Ferguson 1991, Walters 1996) has, however, shed more light on the major principles of diglossia.

The two most important defining principles of diglossia are function and acquisition. The other principles - prestige, standardization, stability, grammar, lexicon, and phonology - are only significant to the extent that they help in describing and comparing diglossias (Britto 1991).

In a true diglossic situation, therefore, the two codes will be complementary in their functions with the superposed code (H) being utilized in situations that can easily be characterized as formal while the underposed code (L) is used in non formal contexts. In terms of acquisition, the H code is learned through formal means of instruction while the L code is acquired naturally as an L1; the H code does not have native speakers while the L has.

This paper will attempt, therefore, to apply the principles of diglossia outlined above to the case of Tamil. It is important, however, to ground Tamil diglossia within the linguistic culture of South Asia since this geographical area appears to be very rich in diglossias (see Hudson 1994).

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