Digraphia
Digraphia was modeled upon diglossia "the coexistence of two languages or dialects among a certain population", which derives from Greek diglossos δίγλωσσος "bilingual."
"[10] Hall's article was antedated by Demetrios Pieridis's 1875 usage of digraphic instead of bilingual for an inscription written in both the Greek alphabet and Cypriot syllabary.
Darius the Great's (c. 522-486 BCE) Behistun Inscription was written in three cuneiform scripts for Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian.
Compare dysgraphia meaning "a language disorder that affects a person's ability to write" and dysorthographia "a synonym for dyslexia".
The anthropologist James R. Jaquith (1976), who studied unconventional spelling in advertising, used "digraphia" to describe the practice of writing brand names in all caps (e.g., ARRID).
He described digraphia as "the graphic analog of what linguists call diglossia", and defined it as "different versions of a written language exist simultaneously and in complementary distribution in a speech community.
"[18] The sociolinguist Ian R. H. Dale (1980) wrote a general survey of digraphia, defined as, "the use of two (or more) writing systems to represent varieties of a single language.
[20] DeFrancis later explained, "I have been incorrectly credited with coining the term digraphia, which I indeed thought I had created as a parallel in writing to Charles Ferguson's diglossia in speech.
17, p. 268) and did not promote the use of either of these terms, nor follow up on his insights into the importance of studying "the use of two or more different writing systems for the same language... such cases have been more widespread than commonly assumed."
For instance, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which includes over 425,000,000 words, lists digraphia three times in "academic genre" contexts.
Stéphane Grivelet, who edited a special "Digraphia: Writing systems and society" issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, explains.
Describing terminology for "script obsolescence," Stephen D. Houston, John Baines, and Jerrold Cooper say, "'Biscript' refers to a text in two different writing systems.
[28] Dale concluded that, Two primary factors have been identified as operating on a society in the choice of script for representing its language.
[30] Peter Unseth lists and exemplifies four factors that can influence a language community's choice of a script.
Japanese hiragana was initially a women's script, for instance, used by Murasaki Shikibu to write The Tale of Genji.
For example, the names of many heavy metal bands (e.g., Motörhead, Infernäl Mäjesty, Mötley Crüe) use umlauts "to index the musical genre as well as the notion of 'Gothic' more generally.
Similarly, depending on which side of the Punjab border a Punjabi language speaker lives in, India or Pakistan, and religious affiliation, they will use the Gurmukhi or Shahmukhi script respectively.
William C. Hannas distinguishes two digraphic forms of Japanese: "true digraphia" of occasionally using rōmaji Latin alphabet for a few loanwords like DVD, and of regularly using three scripts (technically, "trigraphia") for different functions.
In Java, Javanese people, which were predominantly ruled by Hindu and Buddha kingdoms, have their own writing system, called Hanacaraka.
When the Islamic power took place, a modified Arabic writing system (called Pegon) was introduced, along with the massive introduction of the Latin alphabet by western colonialists.
"[41] Many writers, both from China (e.g., Mao Dun and Zhou Youguang) and from abroad (e.g., John DeFrancis, Victor H. Mair, J. Marshall Unger, and William Hannas[42]) have argued for digraphia to be implemented as a Chinese language standard.
