Example Of A Diglossic Situation

Since Federation in 1901, Australia was largely monolingual, with a vast majority of the populace of British descent. Decades later, the ‘White Australia Policy’ was implemented, where ‘All newcomers will have to learn to speak Australian.’ (AA Caldwell) was largely due to arising xenophobic sentiment and further escalated the monolingual ideal in Australian culture. European migrants arriving before the reversal of the policy experienced significant social pressure to change, which resulted in significant phonological shifts to integrate with the mainstream society. In her 1985 study, Horvath described this phenomenon as ‘Ethnic Broad’. Similarly, second generation migrants had tried to avoid using ethnolects and instead opting for SAE to integrate into society. Although X did not arrive in Australia in the period of extreme monolinguist ideals, she has adopted a Broad Austrian accent; which is demonstrated by the accentuation of vowels. Even now, ‘monolingual community will generally view the multilingual individual in particular ways that are prejudicial to that

Accomplishing goals through intercommunication among members of a community is one characteristic that makes up a discourse community. A discourse community has six characteristics such as having a broadly agreed set of goals, a participatory mechanism to provide information or feedback, acquiring a specific level of language, and members with a suitable degree of relevant content. The community that is a community discourse is India. India occupies the greater part of South Asia and consists of twenty-nine states. India is most known for festivals, food, and jewelry. The constitution of India does not give any language the status of national language. So, communication among the people is not easy with twenty-two languages in one country. India consists of diverse ethnic races and groups who strictly follow specific customs. The cultural diversity of the country is what makes up the discourse customs within the community.

Language use in Australia constantly and rapidly changes to reflect the ever-evolving Australian national identity. It is being influenced by American culture, through its pervasive media, and altered to create a unique identity that addresses the needs of the younger Australians. Technology, the loss and gain of expressions, changing perception of taboo words and political correctness also attribute to the way that language has evolved to fabricate our national identity.

All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary or scientific information, and are, moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them…

After independence in 1947, India adopted Hindi as its national language and decided to make it an official language too. But in a multilingual country like India, establishing an official language was not an easy task. There were, however, several problems with selecting Hindi. After independence, the hatred feelings for British rule indulged with English languages, it reminds Indian mass of the colonial rulers. However, there was also a section of people who believed that the English language has contributed somehow in the freedom struggle of India and is having the capacity to do much good for independent India too. The difference in opinion of these two sections of Indians was one of the causes of language dispute. All these had created

Aboriginal English due to its non-standard nature and the formation of sentences, many Australians dub those who speak this creole as being ‘uneducated,’ and view the language in a negative light. Aboriginal Australians have an distinctive way of speaking, the articles ‘an’ and ‘a’ are often omitted, and base forms of verbs are often used in any context, rather than ‘I painted the wall’ it would become, ‘I paint the wall,’ and along with its own morphological differences, such as ‘brudda’ for ‘brother’ and a lexicon entirely separate from the standard many reject Aboriginal English entirely. Australia has only adopted nouns from Aboriginal languages, place names and other minor aspects of Aboriginal culture, things that add to the nations outward quirkiness, giving Aboriginal langauges and culture a tokenistic quality in the eyes of non-indigenous Australia. Thus, while these variants of Australian English act as another nod toward a notion of multiculturalism that Austrlia endorses as something it actively practices, its rejection in certain circles is also indicative of the racism

In Australian society, varieties of Australian English create different types of prestige and use and can either be the more standard overt prestige or the more informal and casual covert prestige. Teenspeak is a variety of language that creates covert prestige between groups, while ethnolects are a type of Australian English that leads to a non-standard covert prestige. Broad Australian English is a variety of Australian English in which the accent used also creates large amounts of covert prestige and power. Teenagers are a group of individuals who use language to create an identity.

Although English is the official language of Australia, Australia's multicultural society has created many subcategories of Australian English. It can be broke down to different groups based on the ethno-cultural groups such as Lebanese English or Greek English as well as Indigenous English. However, Australian accents comprehensively were separated into broad, general, and cultivated varieties (ABC, 2016). General accent represent the most common accents and it is natural and less strong. Conversely, Broad accents are correlated with working-class speech and are quite strong, but cultivated accents are partly close to British English.

Meanwhile two groups came in existence. One group was the ‘Anglicists’ advocated the revival of English and second was the ‘Orientalists’ who advocated the revival of Sanskrit and Persian learning in India but the noted Hindu leaders like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Christian missionaries like William Carey advocated Western education through the medium of English. and thus a controversy arose between these groups. It withheld the smooth progress of English in India.

There are many indicators of identity by which we are made known individually, socially and culturally; the best of these would be language and how it has shown great flexibility in accommodating the needs of people. Through language people have been able to establish their identities and cultivate friendships with others who share the same common ground. By looking at accents such as Broad Australian English, slang and phonological features as they apply to Australian varieties, we can see how it has forged solidarity and assisted in creating an identity on an individual and national scale.

In his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein states that language is by nature external and community driven, therefore the notion of a private language is impossible. Wittgenstein argues that in a private language, “the words of this language are to refer to what the speaker can know- to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language”(PI 243). Wittgenstein contends that among other reasons private language is flawed in that there is no way that the speech community can verify to see if the language is being used correctly. Wittgenstein’s argument that you cannot have an internal language is flawed because it overlooks the crucial internal functions of the brain that facilitate language, both

In the article, “Language Use in West Indian Literature” written by Maureen Warner-Lewis, language encompasses a word system of morphology, semantics, syntax,

Hence if we look at all the Indo Aryan languages, one aspect if quite clear is that they are all derivatives of Sanskrit (Sebeok, 1963) which in turn have their roots set in Greek and Latin and made its way into Indian soil via the Indo-Europeans (Sebeok, 1963). Out of all these Indo Aryan languages, Hindi is considered to be the most progressive, as it is the most analytical followed by Punjabi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Marathi, Bengali, and Oriya (Sebeok, 1963).

Through looking at patterns of social interaction of different languages it is easy to predict the linguistic results of language contact. This could be seen through multilingualism which is a result of language contact between multiple different languages. Multilingualism can create diglossia which helps display the multilingualism of a country or community and helps show it is useful for predicting the results of language contact. Code switching in which people switch from one language to another depending on the situation, helps show how social interaction between speakers of different languages helps us predict the linguistic results of language contact. Then there is dialect levelling and language change which helps show the beginning

Language is used by different people in various situations. As an aspect of study of the relationships between codes and social structure, diglossia is an important concept in the field of sociolinguistics. The term diglossia refers to a situation in which two dialects are used by a single language community.