The Diglossia Situation in Bangladesh

Diglossia is one of the major concepts in the study of societal multilingualism. It belongs to the discipline of macro sociolinguistics as it is a phenomenon relating more to a group rather than an individual. It is also considered as a natural falsehood in any language. This research aims at finding the existence and the nature of diglossic situation in Bangladesh mainly from the prespective of the language use of Bangla speech community. This paper also focuses on issues related to the linguistic synthesis of diglossia including phonological, morphological/lexical, syntactic and semantic differences among the standard, mixed and dialect/regional varieties of Bangla language. Finally this research endeavour shows that double overlapping diglossic situation exist in Bangladesh. Farthermore Ferguson's defination of diglossia does not entirely match with the real context of the language situation in Bangladesh.