Diglossia and the Linguistic Culture that maintains it.

Speech communities have belief systems about their language--origin myths, beliefs about `good' and `bad' language, taboos, shibboleths, and so on. These beliefs are part of the social conditions that affect the maintenance and transmission of that language. Thus, the fact that a language is diglossic is actually a feature of the linguistic culture of the area where that language is used, rather than of the language per se. To speak of a particular language as diglossic or not is at best imprecise, since a language (e.g. English) as spoken in one part of the world may exhibit little or no diglossia, while the same language (again using English as an example) as used in a Caribbean creole community would have to be considered diglossic. Speakers of a particular language can not be characterized as diglossic; only their behavior, or the behavior of the speech community can be considered diglossic. Thus, beliefs and attitudes about the language condition the maintenance of diglossia as a fact of linguistic culture. In the case of the Tamils, for example, it is the set of beliefs about the antiquity and purity of Tamil that unites all members of the linguistic culture in its resistance to any change in the corpus or status of Tamil, by which of course is meant H-variety Tamil. (Schiffman 1974: 127).