Literary language

If there is a strong divergence between a written form and the spoken vernacular, the language is said to exhibit diglossia.

[5] At this time and into the Renaissance, the practice of aureation (the introduction of terms from classical languages, often through poetry) was an important part of the reclamation of status for the English language, and many historically aureate terms are now part of general common usage.

The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia—the use of two distinct varieties of the same language, usually in different social contexts.

This diglossic situation facilitates code-switching in which a speaker switches back and forth between the two varieties of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence.

In instances in which highly educated Arabic-speakers of different nationalities engage in conversation but find their dialects mutually unintelligible (e.g. a Moroccan speaking with a Kuwaiti), they are able to code switch into MSA for the sake of communication.

Some of these variants have their own literary form, but none of them are currently used in official formal registers, although they may be used in legal transcription, and in certain media and entertainment settings.

Amongst the differences is the regular use of the genitive case or the simple past tense Präteritum in written language.

In vernacular German, genitive phrases ("des Tages") are frequently replaced with a construction of "von" + dative object ("von dem Tag") - comparable to English "the dog's tail" vs. "the tail of the dog" - likewise the Präteritum ("ich ging") can be substituted with the perfect ("ich bin gegangen") to a certain degree.

Nevertheless, the use of neither the Präteritum nor especially the genitive case is totally unusual in daily language, though it is considered rare, and might be dependent on a region's dialect and/or the grade of education of the speaker.

It still has relevance for historians, literary scholars, and lawyers (many Japanese laws that survived World War II are still written in bungo, although there are ongoing efforts to modernize their language).

Following the government policy after the World War II, the standard form of contemporary Japanese language is used for most literature published since the 1950s.

The works of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, preserve some early basilectal Latin features, as does the recorded speech of the freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter.

[15] N'Ko publications include a translation of the Qur'an, a variety of textbooks on subjects such as physics and geography, poetic and philosophical works, descriptions of traditional medicine, a dictionary, and several local newspapers.

The language written today remains essentially the same as that used by Ferdowsi despite variant colloquial dialects and forms.

For many centuries, people belonging to the educated classes from the Bosphorus to the Bay of Bengal would be expected to know some Persian.

[17] Persian was the second major vehicle after Arabic in transmitting Islamic culture and has a particularly prominent place in Sufism.

At the beginning of the 19th century, it was severely attacked by Vuk Karadžić and his followers, whose reformatory efforts formed modern literary Serbian based on the popular language, known as Serbo-Croatian.

Tagalog was the basis of the Filipino language; both share the same vocabulary and grammatical system and are mutually intelligible.

However, there is a significant political and social history that underlies the reasons for differentiating between Tagalog and Filipino.

It was written using Baybayin, a syllabary which is a member of the Brahmic family, before the Spanish Romanised the alphabet beginning in the late 15th century.

Native Tagalog-speakers meanwhile comprise one of the largest linguistic and cultural groups of the Philippines, numbering an estimated 14 million.

Now, Standard Tibetan, based on the Lhasa dialect, serves as the high register in China.

[24] Additionally, it has some features peculiar to itself only, for example the simplified vowel harmony system, as well as foreign structures, such as calques from English which originated in early translations of religious works.

The first novel in the Yorùbá language was Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale (The Forest of A Thousand Demons), written in 1938 by Chief Daniel O. Fagunwa (1903–1963).