Diglossia and Linguistic Areas.

If diglossia is an aspect of linguistic culture, it may result from and be maintained by the existence of a linguistic area (Emeneau 1956) in which diglossia is an areal feature as well as a feature of a particular linguistic culture within the area. In South Asia, and in those Southeast Asian linguistic cultures that use Indic writing systems, diglossia seems to be a well-nigh inherent characteristic of the linguistic cultures, since there is a tendency to develop diglossia even in languages that originally may have not exhibited a great degree of it. When Hindustani was chosen as the national language of independent India, supposedly because of its wide use as a lingua franca in the area, steps were immediately taken to develop an H variety, highly Sanskritized in vocabulary, since the vernaculars of Hindi then in existence seemed to be too `Low' for many citizens of the country. Of course diglossicization as a value may vary from sub-culture to sub-culture in the region, but it cannot be denied that the overall view in South Asia and peninsular Southeast Asia is pro-diglossic.