Over
6000 languages exist, although some of those should probably be considered
dialects of a single language
Only
about 200 are formal written languages.
Therefore,
most people around the world, and certainly in those places that have formal educational
systems, are diglossic. They understand
two languages, the written and the oral, equally well.
Language
teachers tend to teach the formal, written form of the language. They also tend to imply that the oral form is
somehow inferior. It is not. It is simply different. It also tends to be far more regionalized
than the standard language, although modern communications is doing a good job
of homogenizing these oral forms.
Written
languages tend to become somewhat fossilized, preserving vocabulary and other
forms that have disappeared from common speech.
Oral languages change constantly.
They tend to change more slowly, however, if there is also a standard,
written version.
Written
languages also allow far more complex constructions than are possible in spoken
language. Nonetheless, spoken languages
may, in some ways, be more complex than written (e.g., oral Chinese tends to
have more than the four tones of standard Chinese).
A
half century ago, many Americans were triglossic. They had been raised at a time when there was
wide familiarity with the King James translation of the Bible. When that translation was carried out, in ad 601, the translators used a form of
English that even then was archaic.
To
us, Shakespeare, who was writing about the same time, is hard to understand,
even if we are familiar with the English of the King James Bible, because of
the changes that had occurred.
Shakespeare wrote in the oral language of the time. Many words appear for the first time in print
in Shakespeare's plays. This doesn't
mean he invented the words, just that oral, or vernacular, English was not
typically written down. Scholars used
either the more formal standard English or they wrote in Latin.
My
point in these observations is to encourage my readers to recognize that languages
are dynamic. They are always
changing. And we should also realize
that we all speak more than one dialect, even though we may not be aware of it.
