{"id":17821,"date":"2015-02-20T14:28:35","date_gmt":"2015-02-20T19:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=17821"},"modified":"2015-02-20T14:43:48","modified_gmt":"2015-02-20T19:43:48","slug":"comparative-diglossia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=17821","title":{"rendered":"Comparative diglossia"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the comments on \"From Bushisms to la langue Fran\u00e7ois<\/a>\", there was some discussion of whether French is more diglossic than\u00a0English — that is, whether the differences between (formal) writing and (informal) speech are greater in French than in English. As I mentioned, it's not clear how and what to count — informal\u00a0words and expressions, informal morphological and syntactic variants, sentence complexity and discourse structure? Is the issue relative frequency, or categorically different options? And there's the question of whose version of French or English, \u00a0as used in what contexts, to look at.<\/p>\n

But however we\u00a0answer these questions, I remain unconvinced that French is more diglossic than English. Here are a few of the\u00a0routine features\u00a0of more-or-less mainstream spoken English that are not found in formal writing:<\/p>\n

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Missing\u00a0subject pronouns —<\/p>\n

Seems likely.<\/span>
\n Got milk?<\/span>
\n Dunno.<\/span><\/p>\n

Vernacular quotatives such as \"be like\" and \"go\" — these examples are from the Switchboard corpus —<\/p>\n

I was like well I don't know how long it takes<\/span>
\n I just got an email and I was like hey okay sure<\/span>
\n I walked in and they go oh my God<\/span><\/p>\n

The verbal auxiliary \"had of\", common in counter-factuals (and some negative concord as well) —<\/p>\n

Because otherwise you know if she had of missed her flight i'm pretty sure they wouldn't have paid for that<\/span>
\nIt seems to me if I had of went to school and did what I was supposed to do,\u00a0then I wouldn't of never married him 'cause I wouldn't of met him 'cause I would have been in college<\/span>
\nI feel like that if I had of gone to a private school during junior high I probably wouldn't have developed such good study skills<\/span><\/p>\n

Correlatives and other concatenated phrases with implied syntactic and semantic subordination, as in these examples from Elmore Leonard's LaBrava<\/em><\/a>, quoted in\u00a0\"Parataxis in\u00a0Pirah\u00e3<\/a>\", 5\/19\/2006:<\/p>\n

\"What're you having, conch? You ever see it they take it out of the shell? You wouldn't eat it.\"<\/span>
\n \"We get here,\" Larry Mendoza said, \"this guy's already got a crew working.\"<\/span>
\n \"Listen,\" Renda said, \"we get to a phone we're out of the country before morning.\"<\/span>
\n \"All right, I call some more friends. They get us out of the the country, some place no extradition, and wait and see what happens.\"<\/span>
\n \"That goddam truck of his, he can go anywhere,\" Renda said. \"He told me, he comes up here hunting.\"<\/span><\/p>\n

From Road Dogs<\/em>, questions without inversion:<\/p>\n

Foley said, \u201cYou thought you\u2019d be cuffed to the bed?\u201d<\/span>
\n\u201cA cop shot you?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

From the same source, that-deletion<\/em> before missing subjects —<\/p>\n

\"I was into some shit at the time didn\u2019t work out.\u201d<\/span>
\nShe\u2019s working for a magician, Emile the Amazing, jumping out of boxes till he fired her and hired a girl Adele said has bigger tits and was younger.<\/span><\/p>\n

And so on…<\/p>\n

This list doesn't prove anything, any more than the lists of speech\/writing differences in French prove anything. \u00a0And the original question itself is not very important — but it would be useful to have a way to quantify (different dimensions of) diglossia, as input to educational and cultural policy if nothing else.<\/p>\n

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In the comments on \"From Bushisms to la langue Fran\u00e7ois\", there was some discussion of whether French is more diglossic than\u00a0English — that is, whether the differences between (formal) writing and (informal) speech are greater in French than in English. As I mentioned, it's not clear how and what to count — informal\u00a0words and expressions, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-variation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17821"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17836,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17821\/revisions\/17836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}