This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Why “it’s a diglossia!” explains so many social dynamics’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about when there are two different social roles for two languages or varieties in a society (a.k.a. “diglossia”). But first, the LingComm grants are coming back for 2026. If you’re working on sharing linguistics concepts with broader audiences or you know someone who is (whether in person, online, with kids, through art, video, audio, writing, in-person events, in other languages, or some other idea we haven’t thought of) we have 300 US dollar small grants to support your cool project, which also come with a mentorship meeting with us or a LingCommer who we know who has experience working on something similar that we can connect you with.

Lauren: LingComm grant applications close on the 30th of April 2026. That’s the end of April anywhere on Earth. Thanks to the generosity of several people, we have more grants to give out than we expected. Now, we need people to apply for them. Tell people to apply for a LingComm grant. For more information about applying, go to LingComm.org/grants.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was an update on what we’re up to in 2026 and a discussion of some great linguistics books, including Talking Hands by Margalit Fox and Hellspark by Janet Kagan.

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Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to bonus episodes, to sponsor your very own character of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and for more ways of supporting us.

[Music]

Gretchen: I sent you a text from a party that I was at recently, saying, “Lauren, we have to do an episode about diglossia.” People keep asking about linguistics things at parties, which to be clear, I love. Several times recently, the answer has been “diglossia,” but because people don’t know what diglossia is – and at a party, they wanna hear a 3-minute explanation of something (they don’t quite wanna sit there for my full 30-minute explanation of something) – saying, “Oh, that’s a great question. The answer is diglossia,” does not help as much as I want it to help.

Lauren: Look, to be honest, it’s not the first time you’ve sent me the text message, “I was at a party, and the answer was diglossia.” I thought we’d have a chat about this question in a bit more detail because I’ve refilled my drink. I’ve got my canapés. I have nowhere else to be for the next 30 minutes.

Gretchen: You’re gonna be my party-guest-slash-victim. I’m gonna put the question into your mouth because you’re my party guest. Part of the reason why this question keeps coming up for me at parties is partially because I live in Montreal. This is a question that is particularly relevant to French.

Lauren: I feel like it’s also a question that is also particularly relevant to French learners, which is “I keep being told that the way I’m doing something is wrong, but everybody does it. If everybody does it, how is it wrong?” This is the French-learning paradox.

Gretchen: Diglossia itself explains a whole lot of things. One of the questions that you, my party victim, can keep in your mind towards the end of this is “Is everything secretly a diglossia? Are there way more hidden diglossias than we thought there were now that we have this diglossic lens to look on the world with?” We’re talking about French, but you can keep this in mind for any other language or linguistics situation how many of these are diglossias.

Lauren: The answer is diglossia. What is a “diglossia,” Gretchen? My dinner party conversationalist.

Gretchen: Your audition for Jeopardy guest is going great.

Lauren: [Laughs]

Gretchen: At its most neutral form, a “diglossia” involves two languages or dialects or varieties of a single language or two quite different languages that are in stable use in the same place by the same people for different social situations. One of them is more prestigious than the other.

Lauren: I’m hearing “social baggage.” I’m hearing maybe a bit of “political complexity.” This sounds like a very specific situation. Is this really something that crops up all the time?

Gretchen: Part of the reason why it’s hidden is that, oftentimes, one of them isn’t considered a real language.

Lauren: Okay, that’s a great way to make it invisible.

Gretchen: You might think, okay, this is just multilingualism. It’s a specific kind of multilingualism. The answer is “Sometimes, yes,” but multilingualism is a whole bunch of other things. But the way that diglossia hides is by one of them being the “real” version of the language, and the other ones just being “bad” versions.

Lauren: Right. I guess this is one of those situations where variation between two dialects or two varieties hides in the fact that the boundary between “What is a language?” and “What is a dialect?” is often also really hidden.

Gretchen: Exactly. Especially when, as is often the case, one of them is the one that gets written down and the other one doesn’t get written down.

Lauren: I’m gonna assume the written-down one is the prestige one.

Gretchen: You’d be correct about that. Then you can hide that as, okay, well the writing is the real form of the language, which we’re gonna unpack, and the spoken thing is just like, “That’s just what people say, but it’s not the correct thing.” This is the hidden aspect of the diglossia if we’re ignoring how people actually talk to each other, and we’re only paying attention to writing, you can be like, “Yeah, there’s one language here.”

Lauren: Which is a good reason, as a linguist, to pay attention to how people actually speak to each other.

Gretchen: It sure is. Especially when these varieties are related to each other. Let’s talk about some concrete examples because we’re gonna get back to French and how French is a secret, hidden diglossia, but let’s talk about a classic diglossic situation first that everyone agrees is a diglossia so we can get a little bit more clarity. Very classic example of a diglossia is Arabic. When I studied Arabic for a couple years in university, they were very clear with us, like, “We’re teaching you Modern Standard Arabic, which is based on Classical Arabic but with modern vocabulary and stuff, but no one actually really speaks this, but everyone recognises it and learns it in school because a.) Modern Standard Arabic is the thing you learn in classrooms. You go to a classroom to learn this. If you’re learning it in the classroom, you got to learn the classroom thing.”

Lauren: And then you have people speaking Egyptian Arabic. I’ve definitely read about Moroccan Arabic. They do cool stuff with gesture. There’s all these different – Jordanian Arabic is slightly different again.

Gretchen: Exactly. You have these different varieties of Arabic, which are certainly related to each other and related to the Modern Standard variety or the Classical variety, which is the version that’s found in the Quran. They’re related to each other historically, but they are not necessarily mutually intelligible. You know, somebody speaking Moroccan Arabic and someone speaking Egyptian Arabic can’t necessarily understand each other. So, sometimes, when you have people who are from multiple Arabic-speaking regions, they end up using the Modern Standard variety that’s found on, like, news to communicate with each other across those dialect boundaries, even though you would sound like an absolute weirdo if you were talking in Modern Standard Arabic to, like, your kid, or your dog, or your friends in a casual social situation because no one does that.

Lauren: This is where, as a single speaker operating in this community, everyone agrees “We use Moroccan Arabic for these parts of our lives and Modern Standard Arabic for these other parts of our lives.”

Gretchen: Right. And some of these local varieties may be different even between cities in the same country or regions in the same country, or they may have slightly larger regional varieties, but everyone agrees that there’s multiple Arabics. Everyone agrees this is literally a textbook diglossic situation.

Lauren: Has Arabic always been the go-to example of a diglossia?

Gretchen: There is a classic article by a linguist named Charles A. Ferguson in 1959 called, “Diglossia,” in a journal called WORD – very bold titles, I love it –

Lauren: To the point

Gretchen: – where he introduces diglossia as a term for English speakers. It had been previously used in French as “diglossie,” which has been applied to the same situation. His four textbook citation examples are Arabic, Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. Those are his defining examples of diglossia. Arabic is literally textbook – I mean, he wasn’t writing a textbook; he was writing an article. But Arabic is literally in the defining examples of diglossia.

Lauren: This is why I’ve heard this contrast between standard and local varieties of Arabic framed in this way before.

Gretchen: If English speakers on average knew more about the situation in Arabic and knew that it was fully a diglossia, then I would be able to say, “It’s a diglossia” at parties, and people would be like, “Ah, yes, of course, like Arabic, which we all understand in detail.” But sadly, this is not true among my friends, so it’s worth getting through what the situation is like – and also talking about these other three paradigmatic examples that Ferguson talks about.

Lauren: What are some of the features of diglossia that were in the definitive article?

Gretchen: In a diglossia, you have two varieties that are the high form of the language, or the high language, and the low form of the language. They’re associated with different levels of prestige, with different types of situations, and so, for example, in Arabic, the high form is Modern Standard Arabic, and the low form is whatever the regional variety is (Egyptian, Moroccan, etc.).

Lauren: But they don’t have to be related languages, right? Because I’m thinking about that era in Europe where your vernacular language may have been a Romance language, but it may have been a language like English, but your formal prestige language was Latin that’s directly related.

Gretchen: That can still be a diglossia. The formal language, the written language, can be related or unrelated. They can have varying degrees of relationship. In Greek, you have two forms of the Greek language, one is the high form, which is modelled after Classical Greek and adapted to the modern language, and one is the Demotic form of Greek, which is the casual variety. Spoiler: Greek isn’t still like this. People have stopped using the modern-after-classical one for news broadcasts and stuff now. They now just use the Demotic form, the low form, for most social situations, so it doesn’t necessarily stay the same. But in 1959, when Ferguson is writing this article, this seems to be the stable situation for Greek.

Lauren: I guess “stable” being a reminder of persistent but not necessarily forever. We don’t send kids to school in Latin anymore.

Gretchen: Exactly. In Swiss German, the high form of the language is High German, which is the one that’s spoken in a variety of countries where German is spoken. The low form is Swiss German – so Standard German and Swiss German. This is not necessarily the case in other places. In other places, in Germany, for example, or at least in parts of Germany, High German (Hochdeutsch) is the normal form people are talking to their kids in, and there isn’t this same bifurcation between the two varieties. But in Switzerland, again, at least at the time this article was written (things may have changed somewhat), there’s this bifurcation. And then in Haiti, you have French as the high form as the language, and Haitian Creole, which is ultimately derived from French with influences from other languages, as the low form of the language. Again, French is used in France as a language people do speak to children in and do lots of other stuff in, but in Haiti you have this distinction. Again, there’s been a growing movement to use Haitian Creole in more circumstances in Haiti for some of the same reasons as – this has been the case in Greece and Switzerland and things like that. “How much of this is stable?” is the real question. In some of these cases, we have a high form of the language that is used as the normal form of the language in other places. In some places, the high form is only ever used as the really formal variety, like in Arabic.

Lauren: You can’t just use the languages objectively to say one is definitely high and one is definitely low. It’s about this particular context as well.

Gretchen: It’s about the particular social context. Ferguson gives this really nice table breaking down a bunch of context where he thinks these are the main linguistic contexts and, in each one, whether the high or low variety is used. Do you wanna guess, actually? If I give you some context, do you wanna guess which ones are high and which ones are low?

Lauren: Sure. Let’s do this.

Gretchen: All right. Context Number 1: a sermon in a church or mosque. High or low?

Lauren: Well, I get to cheat because you just told me that Classical Arabic is the language of the Quran and, therefore, is the form of the language used in religious ceremonies. But also, up until very recently in Catholicism, masses were said in Latin and sometimes still are. I’m gonna guess that’s the high.

Gretchen: That is absolutely the high form. Even in English you sometimes see some “thees” and “thous” floating around. They’re not quite the high form of the language, but they’re certainly an older form of the language that is sometimes found in religious contexts.

Lauren: We give that a bit of a social prestige buff for those.

Gretchen: Absolutely. Next context: instructions to servants, waiters, workmen, and clerks (is the four professions).

Lauren: I mean, as an Australian who lives with the erroneous belief that we are a very egalitarian and informal society, just the idea of having servants makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, but I guess this is your everyday – you’re interacting with everyday people – you’re going for your more vernacular-slash-low variety of the language.

Gretchen: You’re correct. This is a low variety. If you’re writing a personal letter to someone. Do you use the high or low? This one’s maybe trickier.

Lauren: This is where I have to ponder how long it’s been since I’ve written a personal letter – how much my personal letter writing has been influenced by my informal, online language use. But also, Gretchen, I’m taking it for granted that literacy is the domain of everyday people. So, maybe – I guess I am more formal. If I was writing you a letter, I would be like, “Dear Gretchen,” so maybe literacy is prestige and high.

Gretchen: Ah, you’re correct. I was really wondering if you were gonna go for low, but that is also considered a high context.

Lauren: That was a real roller coaster.

Gretchen: Note that this paper is from 1959. This is pre-texting. We can get into texting in a bit. Next context: a speech in parliament or a political speech. High or low?

Lauren: I think Ferguson and I are hanging out in different social domains, but parliament is a very formal place. They get very stuffy. I’ll say high.

Gretchen: Absolutely. University lecture.

Lauren: I mean, I’m pretty chatty, but I am 60 years younger than Ferguson, so I guess university lectures are meant to be very formal, so prestige.

Gretchen: Absolutely. This is sort of a classroom kind of variety, so you have to put it in the classroom. Next up: conversation with family, friends, colleagues – all the same.

Lauren: For the record, I do not speak to my family and my friends and my colleagues in exactly the same way even with my delusions of egalitarian-ness. But they’re all very close to me. They’re all very much people I hang out with every day. So, maybe the low variety rather than the standard.

Gretchen: You got this. Absolutely. That’s low. Next up is “news broadcast.” When was the last time you listened to a news broadcast?

Lauren: I listen to very chatty news broadcasts, but I also know in Australia we had this whole accent that people only ever really heard on the radio that was very much more British-adjacent. I still remember watching – not watching live but watching re-runs of the first television broadcast in Australia, and it was [British-ish accent], “Welcome to Television.”

Gretchen: Oh, we had one of those in Canada, too. We had a whole British-inflected radio-TV voice that is out of date now but used to exist.

Lauren: That is so high that it prestiged itself into extinction. I’ll say high.

Gretchen: Absolutely. Next up (I’m sure you listen to these all the time): a radio soap opera.

Lauren: Look, I’m gonna do my best to extrapolate that to my personal context, which is gossipy podcasts, which are absolutely – if you told me, “radio soap opera,” I would default to formal as well. But if I actually think about it in its modern equivalent, like a gossipy YouTube breakdown video – vernacular.

Gretchen: Yeah. That is also low. I think these are like, soaps, the idea is that they’re everyday people having dramas about who’s having whose baby kind of thing. That’s definitely low. This is the telenovela genre. Okay. Newspaper editorial, news story, caption on picture – high or low?

Lauren: I mean, newspapers are always pretty formal in their language. I’ll go high.

Gretchen: Yeah, that one’s high. Next up (as its own category): caption on political cartoon.

Lauren: Wow, that’s a really specific niche. I’m 100% gonna guess this because I don’t really have a lot of data to work with. If news broadcast is formal, soap opera is informal and low, newspaper editorial is high, I’m gonna say that caption on a political cartoon is in the vernacular-slash-low more often.

Gretchen: Absolutely.

Lauren: Which I think reinforces this point that it is both of these varieties used by the same group of people because the same person can be listening to the same radio station and understand both the news and the soap opera – understand the newspaper and the joke-y, slang-y political cartoon.

Gretchen: I think this is also – when I think of a political cartoon, when I saw that and was thinking about the Quebec context, I was like, “Oh, the political cartoon is where you’re so much more likely to see vernacularised Quebec-specific spellings of formal language.” For the most part, there’s not as much writing in the low variety, but there is still an ability to represent the low variety in writing as you can see in political cartoons or as you can see in like, you know when you go to a tourism tchotchke shop, and they have t-shirts that say, like, “Here’s a local word that you can say,” “that you can buy on a shirt” or “on a mug.” In Quebec they say things like, “icitte,” which is Québécois for “ici,” which is “here,” but “icitte” is the Québécois way of saying “here.” Localising the word for “here” is an especially strong way of saying that it’s local. You see this on t-shirts and ball caps and things like that. Okay, final two – again, this is another pair – we have poetry versus folk literature.

Lauren: Oof. I think Ferguson and I just live in different realities – with deepest respect to poets I love who are trying so hard to blur the boundary. I assume he’s speaking of the kind of – you read Shakespeare; you read very formal language; it’s in the high variety. Folk literature – much more your everyday language.

Gretchen: This is the formal-sonnets-type-poetry-versus-slam-poetry distinction. Are you using the vernacular? This is a high-low distinction. I’m gonna read a paragraph from Ferguson because I think it illustrates an important point, “The importance of using the right variety in the right situation can hardly be overestimated. An outsider who learns to speak fluent, accurate L and then uses it in a formal speech is an object of ridicule. A member of the speech community who uses H in a purely conversational situation or in an informal activity like shopping is equally an object of ridicule. In all the defining languages, it is typical behaviour to have someone read aloud from a newspaper written in H and then proceed to discuss the contents in L. In all of the defining languages, it’s typical behaviour to listen to a formal speech in H and then discuss it – often with the speaker himself – in L. The last two situations on the list call for comment. In all the defining languages, some poetry is composed in L, and small handful of poets compose in both, but the status of the two kinds of poetry is very different. For the speech community as a whole, it is only the poetry in H that is felt to be ‘real’ poetry. On the other hand, in every one of the defining languages, certain proverbs, politeness formulas and the like are in H even when cited in ordinary conversation by illiterates. I has been estimated that as much as one-fifth of the proverbs in the active repertoire of Arab villagers are in H.”

Lauren: Okay, so maybe Ferguson and I are in the same reality because poets who are doing very interesting things with everyday language are often seen as being more invisible or less legitimate than reading your classic sonnets. So, maybe things haven’t changed as much as I think they have. But this idea that everyone is using both varieties all the time and shift between them depending on the domain is a key feature of what makes diglossia a very specific form of multilingualism.

Gretchen: Exactly. The differences between the two varieties can be relatively large. I wanna read another paragraph from Ferguson that I think illustrates this well. “A striking feature of diglossia is the existence of many paired items – one H, one L – referring to fairly common concepts frequently used in both H and L where the range of the two meanings is roughly the same, and the use of one or the other immediately stamps the utterance or written sequence in H or L. For example, in Arabic, the H word for ‘see’ is ‘ra’a.’ The L word is ‘shaf.’ The word ‘ra’a’ never occurs in ordinary conversation, and ‘shaf’ is not used in normal, written Arabic. If, for some reason, a remark in which ‘shaf’ was used is quoted in the press, it is replaced by ‘ra’a’ in the written quotation. In Greek, the H word for ‘wine’ is ‘inos.’ The L word is ‘krasi.’ The menu will have ‘inos’ written on it, but the diner will ask the waiter for ‘krasi.’ The nearest American English parallels are in cases such as ‘illumination’ – ‘light’ – ‘purchase/buy’ or ‘children/kids.’ But in those cases, both words may be written and both may be used in ordinary conversation. The gap is not so great as for the corresponding doublets in diglossia.”

Lauren: I read that paragraph, and I decided we should do a wine bar tour of Athens.

Gretchen: [Laughs] To see if this still the case since 1959.

Lauren: Just to check.

Gretchen: What did you find on the menus? Dis they say “inos,” which is the H form, or “krasi,” which is the L form?

Lauren: Yes, you have correctly identified we don’t have the budget to send us both to Athens on a wine bar tour.

Gretchen: If the Athens tourism bureau wants to sponsor this podcast, please get in touch.

Lauren: Wants to sponsor our very important update on Ferguson 1959. I did the next best thing, and I poked around some of the menus people took photos of for wine bars on various maps and tourism websites.

Gretchen: What did you find? Are they still using “inos,” or they switched to “krasi,” or what?

Lauren: What I found is they’re mostly using the word “wine,” which is slightly disappointing. But I do have at least one example of “krasi” on the menu.

Gretchen: Ah, okay. So, it is not explicitly the case that – I mean, to be fair, I don’t know how good your Greek is, but I expect you were partially doing this search in English.

Lauren: I was partly doing this search in English.

Gretchen: This is something that’s changed in the last number of decades that the formerly L variety has just become the version that’s used all around places in Greece.

Lauren: I think it’s so interesting that even from this first example, he’s talking about H and L. He’s just immediately shrunk down “high, prestige,” this common phenomenon across these different contexts, into H, and this “vernacular, everyday” into L, and that that is there from the very beginning, and that he kind of invents “diglossia” in this etymologically slightly confusing way.

Gretchen: I love that “diglossia” comes from Greek “di,” meaning “two,” and “glossa,” meaning “language,” literally “tongue,” which is the same etymology as “bilingualism,” which is “bi,” meaning “two,” and “lingua,” meaning “tongue” or “language” in Latin, but just a different word in Greek. These are complete cognates. They both mean “two languages.” They’re just “two languages” in slightly different social situations that we’ve decided to make separate for an academic purpose.

Lauren: I think bilingualism is the general phenomenon of where a group of people – maybe there’s a society – that is bilingual even if the individuals in it are not.

Gretchen: I mean, Canada is famously a bilingual country, which really just means that some people speak English and some people speak French. There are some people who themselves speak both, but in a lot of cases, like the governmental systems or the signage on the milk cartons, is set up to allow people to be monolingual in their language of choice, which is a different type of situation.

Lauren: I love using exactly the same etymology to coin a new word in English that is for this subset of bilingualism where you have people using these two languages or two varieties in this particular dynamic.

Gretchen: I also want to look into this question of the H and L because high and low prestige are what they correspond to, but originally, H and L, to go to the German context, are “Hochdeutsch,” “High German,” and “Plattdeutsch,” or “Low German,” which I always assumed as a person who hadn’t been to Germany when I first learned about this phenomenon that this referred to “Oh, the north is high, and the south is low,” but in fact, the south is high, and the north is low. Because the highness does not refer to the cardinal directions; it refers to whether there are mountains.

Lauren: We have three different high-low metaphors crashing into each other for German. I would also take a guess that a high and a low variety had to do with north and south, but it’s the opposite. It’s hilly and flat.

Gretchen: It’s hilly and flat. The Netherlands (a.k.a. the low countries) are spoken in a flat area of Europe that is correspondingly prone to flooding.

Lauren: I just had one of those moments where I had to actually think of “nether-lands” as like, the low –

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Right. That one is right there is front of your face, isn’t it.

Gretchen: It’s right there. The high German varieties are spoken in the German highlands, which in Scotland, the highlands are in the north, and so they are both high intrinsic cardinal directions and also high in terms of literally “high-lands” that are mountainous compared to the south of England. But in Germany, the mountain ranges are on the other side of things, and the High German from Germany is spoken in the highlands.

Lauren: Thank you for clarifying that complexity of high and low.

Gretchen: But I think that if the mountainous situation had been different, it’s possible that this metaphor might not have been imported to stand for high and low prestige because it does map onto a familiar conceptual space that if it was the low countries that spoke the prestigious variety, there might have been an entirely different termed because it does have this cross-sensory mapping.

Lauren: I think one of the challenges here is that linguists talk about these community-driven prestige values in a way where it kind of reinforces them, but we don’t necessarily claim to own them, or linguists don’t necessarily want to reinforce (even though they may) these values of high and low. They try and use “high” and “low” as relatively neutral terms because you get things like “vulgar Latin,” or you get these values that have a lot more baggage when it comes to people’s opinions about the everyday language variety.

Gretchen: I think this is particularly interesting in the original Ferguson article even though many people have talked about other languages and linguistic situations where this also occurs because some of these particular examples of local situations have shifted because everyone is using Demotic Greek now, and so it’s less like, “Oh, this version of the language doesn’t exist because it’s not the classical form.” But the attitudes are still being reflected in other types of situations. Here’s another quote, “In all the defining languages, the speakers regard H as superior to L in a number of respects. Sometimes, the feeling is so strong that H alone is regarded as ‘real,’ and L is reported ‘not to exist’.” I found this wasn’t the case when I was studying Arabic because they were like, “Ah, yes, this is clearly a diglossic situation,” but that might be because of this work that’s now been happening over present decades.

Lauren: Or because you weren’t necessarily in one of the contexts where everyday language was just happening and didn’t need to be commented on.

Gretchen: Exactly. But they were still like, “Well, clearly you want to learn the high variety because that’s the only one that’s learnable in a classroom. We’re gonna sort of teach you a little bit of Egyptian Arabic because people kind of understand that from a lot of popular Egyptian media, but the primary thing we’re gonna teach you is this classroom thing.” [Quoting] “Speakers of Arabic may say (in L) that so-and-so doesn’t know Arabic. This normally means that he doesn’t know H, although he may be a fluent, effective speaker of L. If a non-speaker of Arabic asks an educated Arab for help in learning to speak Arabic, the Arab will normally try to teach him H forms, insisting that they’re the only ones to use. Very often, educated Arabs will maintain they never use L at all, in spite of the fact that direct observation shows they use it constantly in all ordinary conversation. Similarly, educated speakers of Haitian Creole frequently deny its existence, insisting they only speak French. This attitude cannot be called a deliberate attempt to deceive the questioner but seems almost a self-deception. When the speaker in question is replying in good faith, it is often possible to break through these attitudes by asking such questions as to what kind of language he uses when speaking to his children, to servants, or to his mother.”

Lauren: The three main groups of people.

Gretchen: “The very revealing reply is usually something like, “Oh, well they wouldn’t understand [the H form, whatever it is called].”

Lauren: I find there’s also a big social difference between the Greek example and the Haitian-Creole-slash-French example in that a lot of the current diglossic situations that we see are a direct result of colonisation and the languages of colonisation being imposed in particular situations. In each situation, the power dynamic at play ends up being different. Again, you can’t just take, “Well, this language comes in, and then this is how the diglossia unfolds” because it’s unique depending on the particular context of any given place. If you think about Portuguese, the whole of Brazil is now an area where Portuguese is considered the standard language. It’s the language of media. But Brazilian Portuguese has become its own standard. There might be variations between how standard your Brazilian Portuguese is, but there’s this understanding of it as its own system with its own social dynamics, whereas somewhere like Mozambique – European Portuguese is still that H variety used in formal situation and news reports, and there’s a local Mozambiquan Portuguese that’s used.

Gretchen: And which has much less prestige associated with it than Brazilian Portuguese, which has become this national standard.

Lauren: Brazilian and European Portuguese have a very different dynamic than Mozambiquan and European Portuguese. Again, taking each social context and its own historical perspective into account when figuring out the dynamic between prestigious and non-prestigious varieties.

Gretchen: This is the thing that brings me back to French, which is when I was learning French in school, which was in Canada but outside of Quebec, we learned France French. This is something that people have told me in many parts of Canada that they learned France French in school. And then once you go up in Quebec somewhere – Quebec City, Montreal, wherever – “Great, I’ve been learning this language for years to communicate with you guys. Here I am trying to communicate.” It turns out that we’ve been learning the wrong French to do that.

Lauren: The Standard French that you learnt in Canada and Montreal French are doing something different.

Gretchen: The Standard French that we learn in Canada is France French, which is spoken in France and, especially, is based on the standard of Paris. You do occasionally, these days, especially in Ontario and places like, especially, Ottawa, places that are closer to Quebec, get some Québécois teachers in Canadian schools. I don’t wanna say people are only learning France French. But by and large, there’s this reliance on France as a standard source of French. You’re more likely to be exposed to media with a Parisian accent. You’re more likely to be exposed to France French and to be using that as a model for both grammar and vocabulary and accent especially. And then you show up in Quebec, really anywhere in Quebec, and the French that you’re hearing – you go into a store, and you try to talk to someone, you try to talk to someone on the street – you’re hearing a completely different accent than what you’ve been exposed to for all those years in school.

Lauren: But this is just a different variety. This isn’t – are people moving between Québécois French and France French in their everyday life, or is this “You just come here and have to learn a new dialect?”

Gretchen: Well, it’s a little bit of one, a little bit of the other because I’ve said this to Québécois people since moving here, like, “Hey, I learned the wrong variety to communicate with you guys. I had to come here and re-learn French and learn some vocabulary differences, learn a lot of accent differences, learn quite a few grammatical differences in terms of actually being able to use spoken French, especially in Quebec, that I wasn’t taught in school. Especially between the difference between speaking and writing, I had to learn quite a difference in terms of French, so that I could actually talk to people here. I would’ve been great if my schooling had prepared me for that in really any way.” The response that I get is really interesting – and I think this is why it’s revelatory that it’s more of a diglossia and less of a “Okay, there’s just two different varieties,” because they’re like, “Oh, but don’t worry. That’s what we learn in school, too.”

Lauren: They’re not learning Quebec French in school; they’re learning France French as well.

Gretchen: Yeah. And they’re like, “Yeah, of course we go to school to learn France French. We go to school to learn written French, to learn Standard French,” which comes with this whole set of baggage – and to learn this French that has – like, there’s a past tense in French that’s only used in writing, in literary writing, that’s not used in speech.

Lauren: Huh, right. Just to clarify, there’s nothing about the relationship between French and English in Montreal that’s diglossia. You can use both on signage. You can use either in school or work depending on where you are. You might be a French speaking household at home or an English speaking household – or you might be bilingual – but there’s not one as the default high.

Gretchen: Right. French and English in Montreal – Montreal is bilingual in the sense of French and English, but this is not a diglossia because, apart from certain situations that are government-mandated where you have to use French – with signage there are laws about how large the French has to be, which has to be larger than the English, and before the English, and this kind of stuff, but that’s because the government has said, “French is important. We want to put it on signs.”

Lauren: Not because English isn’t a real language.

Gretchen: The individual people who’re making the signs and, indeed, before this law was passed, were perfectly happy to put English on signs. It’s not to say that English is a language you can’t put on signage and French is the only language you can put on signs. That’s only the case for legal reasons. It’s not the case for people’s pragmatic sense of what language could go on a sign. The same thing is – there’re people who send their children to French school; there’re people who send their children to English school; there’re people who go home and speak English in the home or French in the home. These are bilingual aspects of the situation, but they’re not diglossic because there aren’t certain social situations where only one form is appropriate and other social situations where only another form is appropriate.

Lauren: Whereas the relationship between Québécois French and France French is diglossia to some extent because in particular formal contexts, there is an orientation towards France French, and then Québécois French is the everyday French, whereas if you went to Paris, you would be learning France French, and then going home and speaking France French.

Gretchen: Well, sort of. But my argument is that maybe French is just diglossic the whole way down.

Lauren: Okay, this is the plot twist I did not expect from you.

Gretchen: Because, yes, there are more differences between how people speak on the street in Montreal or in Quebec and how people speak on the street in France. We do learn the France accent more than the French learn the Quebec accent. But also, there are things that are different between what people call “spoken and written French” that are, if not yet a diglossia, at the very least, verging on a diglossia.

Lauren: I feel like this is where writing systems bring a lot of baggage to high and low forms of a language. Even with the limited French that I know, all of those silent letters really do not help you to speak the language through reading.

Gretchen: All of those silent letters, every French child, when they learn to read and write, has to learn how to do a whole grammatical analysis on their language in order to be able to put the correct T at the end of the word or R at the end of the word in order to know which one it is, whereas in speech people communicate just fine without making this distinction. In addition, silent letters are something English also has. We can get back to “Is English a diglossia?” But French also has a whole tense that’s only used in writing. There’s a whole past tense – the simple past – that’s only used in literary writing. It’s used in children’s picture books for kids to introduce them to this literary past tense.

Lauren: Training into two separate varieties happens very early.

Gretchen: Yeah. But it’s not used in speech ever. Even when I was taking French in school, they were like, “Oh, yeah, you’re not gonna speak this one. You’re only gonna encounter it in writing.” There’s a different way of doing negation in speech versus writing which is pretty basic to the system.

Lauren: I feel like this is where a lot of the French learner paradox of like, “If everyone does it wrong, how is it wrong?” is because spoken and written are actually different varieties to a far greater extent than English, just like you say “kids” when you’re being slang-y and “children” where you’re being formal.

Gretchen: Or like in English, we have this whole system of contractions. You can say “will not,” or you can say “won’t.” But you can write “won’t.” It’s a bit more informal, but it has a standard written form that is associated with slightly less formal writing. In French, the formal way of forming negation is you that you put “ne” before the verb and “pas” after the verb. If you wanna say like, “I don’t know,” that’d be “Je ne sais pas.” In spoken French, nobody says that. You look like you’re a time traveller if you go around saying, “Je ne sais pas.” The spoken way of forming negation – and this is still true in France – is “Je sais pas.” You don’t say the “ne.” You can potentially contract the vowels even more like “J’pas,” which is how people actually say, “I dunno,” rather than, “I do not know,” which, again, you look a bit of a time traveller if you go around saying, “I do not know.”

Lauren: If you look back at the distribution on Ferguson’s table of where you use each variety, you begin to see how writing systems and formal education help create this friction and this distinction between the two varieties.

Gretchen: The things that are sort of parasitic on the written standard, or reading things out loud, or writing itself versus this caption on political cartoon – that’s also where the texting goes. I can read a whole linguistics textbook in French and not have any difficulties because it’s in the formal French that I was trained on, but when I try to read people’s comments under a YouTube video in French, which are written in this vernacular style, the texting-variety of written French (which is newer and more informal, but it doesn’t not have rules; the rules are just emergent from the context), people are doing all sorts of stuff that I’m just not familiar with. It feels like a different variety to me because I’m worse at understanding it, especially in writing. I have to read it aloud to myself and then I go “Oh, that’s what they mean.”

Lauren: I think it’s really great to have stepped back and taken this perspective of the fact that this dynamic between high and low varieties of a language (or high and low languages within the same context) have these similarities because I think when you’re explaining this to a French speaker or to someone looking at the old distinction between English and Latin, it can seem like this is just a one-off case. But Ferguson’s whole idea is this is a recurring dynamic between languages that plays out because of recurring power dynamics in society.

Gretchen: And the hard thing talking about it with French speakers is precisely this thing that is the case in a diglossia where you have a hard time convincing them that the low variety even exists or is real because all of the realities that they’ve been taught in schools have been “Oh, but here’s how you do this written standard; here’s how you do this formal variety.” I guess the big galaxy-brain question is “Is English also a diglossia?” Because there are aspects of written English, especially when it comes to silent letters, that abstract from the pronunciation of any given variety of English, or some varieties pronounce the words the same that are written differently, and some languages say, “Yeah, these words are written differently, and we’re still pronouncing them differently.” Different phonetic mergers have happened in different varieties of English, but we’re still writing them according to one particular set of principles. Or a very few differences like O-U-R versus O-R, but realistically, any English speaker can actually recognise both.

Lauren: There are also situations where you may have someone in your social life who’s in a diglossic relationship. They may be an Aboriginal English speaker in Australia who their particular community is diglossically moving between Standard Australian English and Aboriginal English even if you, yourself, are not. Being aware of these dynamics can be really helpful.

Gretchen: I think one of the things that’s helpful about having a fancy Greek word to talk about it with, like “diglossia,” is that it helps legitimise this thing which otherwise invisibilises a perfectly valid linguistic system that is actually really cool and, often, underappreciated. And to say, you know, it’s not that you’re sometimes speaking the “wrong” version of a language or sometimes speaking the bad version, it’s that there’s this complicated and interesting social dynamic around which one you speak at which time. Both of them have value. Some of them feel more personal, more intimate, more joke-y, more casual. Some of them connect you to a broader history of literature and intellectual tradition. These are both things that are great. It’s not that only one of them has merit.

Lauren: Being aware of this dynamic can help you articulate why we need to respect all varieties even if they have been made invisible in this dynamic.

Gretchen: The other thing that I think this can answer a question of that often comes up for me at parties is “Is technology – is the internet, the printing press, the phone, social media – is this creating a linguistic situation in which we’re all talking more like each other, we’re all using the same English, we’re all using an internationalised version of things that we can talk to each other, or do we still have this linguistic fragmentation? As time progresses, linguistic varieties get more and more distinct from each other.” I think diglossia is one way where the answer can be both. If we’re doing things that let us participate in the lingua franca of a globalised style of English or a globalised style of French or Arabic, Spanish, or any of these other big languages that are spoken in a lot of different places, that globalised style can still exist, and people can use it to do this communication between people in lots of different places, at the same time as the local versions can keep diverging from each other because languages, you know, that’s how entropy works. Languages keep having a tendency to diverge from each other. What can happen is that people are actually fluent in both varieties and use them in different situations. This is way more common than we give it credit for.

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Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba/kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our very cute Gavagai mugs – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media as @gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky; @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include a chat about what books we’re reading in 2025, updates on our various activities and what’s coming next in 2026, an interview with Claire Bowern about the mysterious Voynich manuscript, and a deleted scenes episode with some of our favourite extra bits of interviews and linguistics advice from 2025.

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Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

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