Sinhala Diglossia Revisited, or Diglossia Dies Hard

Abstract In 1959, Charles A. Ferguson published an important paper called “Diglossia,” in which he defined diglossia as: a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of a language (which may include a standard or regional standards) there is a very divergent, highly codified, (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of another period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes, but is not used by any ector of the community for ordinary conversation. (p. 336) Subsequently, I carried out some investigations of diglossia as it obtained in Sinhala (Sinhalese), the majority and official language of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) during fieldwork in 1964-65 (Gair 1968), and I was able, some twelve years after my first observations, to observe some of the changes that had taken place in the interim. Though relatively short, that time span seemed long enough, under current conditions of rapid change, to allow some tendencies to emerge.