List of diglossic regions

Milton M. Azevedo wrote a chapter on diglossia in his monography: Portuguese language (A linguistic introduction), published by Cambridge University Press, in 2005, parts of which are available freely on Google books.

Many also understand and can speak "standard" English; however, in common everyday oral usage, people generally use one or the other exclusively, according to social status and formal education.

Recently, Jamaican patois has gone through a process of decreolization, similar to that which happened with AAVE due to the basilect creole variety developing alongside the acrolect English.

The native Arawak (Taino) had long disappeared, and with the arrival of the English in 1655 the few Spanish settlers on the island fled to Cuba.

The thousands of West African slaves that would be brought in for labour on the island's notorious sugar plantations of the eighteenth century had not yet arrived.

Jamaican patois is sometimes written (in song lyrics, reported speech in books and newspapers for example) but because of the lack of standardization, many words may be spelled in many different ways.

Standard English is taught in Jamaican schools, although teachers may speak to pupils and their parents in patois outside of the classroom.

But a great part of the population speak an informal, barely codified variant of the latter, with many Spanish influences, called Jopará.

Cholitbhasha (চলতিভাষা ) or Cholitobhasha (চলিত cholito = 'current' or 'running'), based on the formal registers of spoken, educated dialects, has much simpler grammatical forms, and has become the modern literary standard.

[13] Examples of this phenomenon include the following lexical items: Historically the literary register was preferred for written Burmese on the grounds that "the spoken style lacks gravity, authority, dignity".

This eventually culminated in the adoption of written vernacular Chinese, which was based on modern spoken Mandarin, for all formal communication.

Unique among the other Chinese language varieties, Cantonese has its own written form, but it is largely used in informal contexts, such as personal communication, internet slang, advertising, music, and film.

[21] One complicating factor is that English is also widely used in Brunei, especially in education, as it is the medium of instruction from upper primary school onwards,[22] so it shares the H role with Standard Malay.

Another code that competes for the H role in some situations is the special palace register of Brunei Malay, which includes an elaborate system of honorific terms for addressing and referring to the Sultan and other nobles.

SStdE is similar to other varieties of Standard English in grammar and lexis but with some of its own features of pronunciation, particularly the use of full vowels (rather than [ə]) in most function words and also the sporadic absence of dental fricatives,[25] while SCE is characterised by a simplified grammar (including the omission of some conjunctions and the copula verb BE) and regular use of pragmatic particles such as lah and ah,[26] as well as frequent inclusion of Hokkien and Malay words.

However, other analysts prefer to see variation in the English spoken in Singapore along a continuum, with the style adopted depending on the education level and circumstances of the conversation.

[27] Some well-educated, proficient speakers have been shown to use mostly SStdE but with many pragmatic particles when talking to their friends,[28] and this seems to provide evidence to support the continuum analysis.

It is certainly true that speakers are able to switch quite abruptly, for example as they exit a classroom and start chatting to their friends,[29] so one way or another there are many characteristics of diglossia in spoken Singapore English.

Additionally, speakers of other Philippine languages originating from different parts of the country, such as Cebuano and Ilokano, will switch to Tagalog when communicating with those outside of their respective regions and in formal settings.

This phenomenon affects almost all areas in the Valencian Community with its Valencian as well as Alghero (whose local Catalan dialect remains in severe danger of extinction despite the recent revival in its usage), some touristy areas and the main cities in the Balearic Islands—sometimes competing with outside languages, for example English— and most of North Catalonia Prior to the Norman invasion of 1066, Old English in its various dialects was spoken in England.

In fact, in cities such as Hanover and Berlin, the dialect started disappearing with the exception of a small minority of Low German speakers that only make up 5 million people.

Swiss Standard German is mostly restricted to being a written language, as spoken Swiss Standard German is merely used in more formal situations such as news broadcasts and serious programmes of the public media channels, public speeches, parliamentary sessions, official announcements, school instruction, and interactions with non-Swiss speakers.

This dispute was eventually settled, and today the single language used in all texts is an educated variant of Dimotiki, which uses many expressions from Katharevousa.

Today their use is receding, but especially in smaller towns and villages it is still common for natives to use the local variety as home language and amongst themselves, and use Italian with outsiders or in formal situations.

In these cases, most members of the minorities are fluent in both their native language and standard Italian, resulting in a situation of bilingualism rather than diglossy.

There have been warnings from several quarters including a linguistics professor from the University of Malta that the Maltese language could become endangered if the government does not do more to promote it, in the same way that English displaced Welsh in Wales.

It was only those of lower class at the time, whose ancestors came from Sicily too long ago for them to still be fluent in Italian, who spoke primarily Maltese.

[33] The main reason for its disappearance within central Poland may be the elimination of Polish elites during World War 2 and the communist period.

Some suggestions are: Both ideas (the Hebrew (1) or the Greek (2) language reforms) have become feasible with globalization and the increase of internet and mass-media usage among Arabs but there must be consensus between governments, scholars and the population and the efforts to follow.

It is therefore imperative to protect Literary Arabic from the dangers of diglossia and bilingualism through taking the necessary measures to foster it and to give it due emphasis.