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rials and poetry, whereas the Low form is used in family conversation, folk literature, and soap opera. Slight overlapping between the two forms occurs, i.e. sometimes the two forms might be used in one domain by switching from H to L and vice versa.

H and L are used for different purposes, and native speakers would find it odd if anyone used H in an L domain, or L in an H domain.

Low (L) is the mother tongue of the speaker in the concerned defining languages (Arabic, Greek Haitian Creole and Swiss German), which have been determined by Ferguson. All speakers learn it as a first language at home as they are more comfortable in the L form than the H. The H form is normally learnt by formal instruction in schools.

In all the defining languages, H is highly standardised and may have a long tradition of grammatical study associated with it. In other words, grammars, dictionaries are a large literature which is associated with it. The L form may not be standardised. In Arabic, for example, the L form has no standard grammatical rules as it differs from one Arabic region to another region, and every Arabic community has its own local L form (dialect).

H is always considered to be more highly valued than the L as a result of the fact that the H variety is used in literature, religious texts, public speaking etc. The L variety is less associated with the written word and is often considered to be a corrupt version of H. It may be found in popular advertising, folklore poetry or used in drama, e.g. to describe comic characters. For Arab Muslims, for example, H is considered to be the language of the Koran, and it is widely believed to ‘constitute the words of God and even to be outside the limits of space and time' (Ferguson, 1959:238).

The syntactic system of H varieties are generally thought to be more complex than the L in terms of grammatical features such as, tense, gender and number. Complex sentence structures are thought not to be a feature of L in the languages determined by Ferguson. The lexicon of the two varieties, on the other hand, is largely shared but there is a difference on account of the specific domains in which each is used. H and L may share the same phonological system, but even at this level of grammar, the H variety is felt to have more complicated phonetic features.

In 1967, Fishman revised and expanded Ferguson's original definition of diglossia. Fishman believed that diglossia must be distinguished from bilingualism (Fasold, 1984). He suggests that bilingualism refers to an individual's ability to use more than one language variety, whereas diglossia refers to the distribution of more than one language variety to serve different communication tasks in a society.

However, Fishman states the view, which he attributes to J. Gumperz that ‘diglossia exists not only in multilingual societies which officially recognize several ‘languages' but, also, in societies which are multilingual in the sense that they employ separate dialects, registers or functionally differentiated language varieties of whatever kind' (Fishman, 1967:30).

Fishman proposes that classic diglossia could be extended to situations where forms of two genetically unrelated languages occupy the H and L do本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。