Outline of a theory of diglossia

The 3,000 or so entries in Mauro Fernandez’s bibliography on diglossia (1993) might well lead one to the conclusion that everything that needed to be said on the subject had already been said. Yet, forty years after the publication of the late Charles Ferguson’s historic paper on diglossia (Ferguson 1959), a coherent and generally accepted theory of diglossia remains to be formulated. In his last major statement on the subject, Ferguson himself was moved to comment on how research over the course of the preceding three decades had failed to adopt a comparative or typological approach to the study of diglossia, having been preoccupied instead with individual case studies focused largely upon the issue of whether a particular language situation was or was not an instance of diglossia (1991: 219). This assessment of the situation may perhaps be seen as a particular example of Chambers’s criticism of sociolinguistic research more generally, to the effect that ‘‘the social science content of sociolinguistics has overshadowed its theoretical implications’’ (1995: 11). It is abundantly clear that Ferguson’s original contributionwas intended to reachbeyond thepurely descriptive and classificatory levels of analysis to the theoretical. The abstract notion of diglossia is derived from the specifics of four prototypical cases, and its synchronic, typological aspect is intimately related to its diachronic, evolutionary one. In Ferguson’s own words, ‘‘what I tried todowas to characterize this situation in thehopes that here we would have discovered one possible element in a general typology of socio-linguistic situations’’ (1963a: 163). This typology was to have led to a ‘‘set of principles or frame of reference,’’ in terms of which patterns of language use and the evolution of verbal repertoires might be conceptualized (1991: 215). Again in Ferguson’s words, ‘‘My goals, in ascending order were: clear case, taxonomy, principles, theory’’ (1991: 215).