APPROACHES TO DIGLOSSIA IN THE CLASSROOM: THE MIDDLE WAY
David Deterding
INTRODUCTION The concept of diglossia was developed by Ferguson (1959). It describes a situation where two languages or language varieties occur side by side in a community, and each has a clear range of functions. One of these varieties, the Hvariety (standing for 'High'), is adopted as the standard variety and is used in official situations, such as government broadcasts, religious services, and teaching; and the other, the L-variety (for 'Low'), is used in informal situations, such as local markets and conversations between friends. The focus of this article is to discuss how the concept of diglossia might be appropriate to describe the Singapore English-speaking community, and to consider what approaches can be adopted by teachers towards the use of the L-variety in schools. Examples of diglossia that have been widely quoted are: the Arabic community, where each region has its own colloquial variety, but classical Arabic is still taught in schools and is regarded by many as “more beautiful” and therefore more appropriate for written texts; the Swiss-German community, where all children learn Standard German in schools, and most books and newspapers are in Standard German, but the people continue to use the local Swiss-German dialect on an everyday basis; the Tamil community, where the language taught in classrooms and used in literature is sharply different from the colloquial variety.
In all these societies, there is high prestige in demonstrating an ability to use the H-variety, but not everyone has sufficient education to achieve this. However, all members of the society use the L-variety at home and when chatting with close friends. In fact, use of the Hvariety instead of the L-variety in an informal situation would be regarded as quite absurd.
