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Fergies prescience: the changing nature of diglossia in Tunisia

2003; De Gruyter; Volume: 2003; Issue: 163 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/ijsl.2003.048

1613-3668

Keith Walters,

Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

Despite criticisms it has received, Ferguson’s (1959b) account of diglossia should be recognized for its prescience. It offered not only an admittedly idealized characterization of diglossia in Arabic, but also pointed out how and why it might change. Focusing on Tunisia, this article demonstrates the many ways in which Fergie was right. It examines the changing demographics of Tunisians’ access to the high variety of Arabic; the complex ways in which Tunisians, and Arabs more generally, deal with the “communicative tensions” diglossia creates; and considers the changing nature of Arabic in what is, in many ways, a postdiglossic Tunisia. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ferguson’s (1959b) paper on diglossia is its prescience: even when Fergie wasn’t quite right, his work pointed future researchers in what have turned out to be especially profitable directions. His discussion was grounded in what he admitted to be an idealized description of four very different cases of a particular relationship between the standard, or “high,” variety of a language and the other, or “low,” less overtly prestigious variety of the same language within a speech community: Arabic, Modern Greek in its relationship to katharevusa, Swiss German in its relationship to High German, and Haitian Creole in its relationship to what we might term standard metropolitan French. Following William Marcais (1930, 1931a, 1931b), Ferguson termed this relationship “diglossia.” As careful readers of the paper will recall, however, Ferguson’s goal was not to offer a complete description of Arabic or Arabic diglossia (or any kind of diglossia). Rather, his goal was to understand the ways in which diglossia represents one possible configuration, often a transitional one, in language standardization, the processes whereby some languages come to have a standard variety (or more properly, varieties) while others do not. In so doing, Fergie altered the trajectory of research on Arabic and, to varying degrees, these other languages. 0165–2516/03/0163–0077 © Walter de Gruyter Int’l. J. Soc. Lang. 163 (2003), pp. 77–109