Concept

Aim of the conference

The conference tried to give answers to the question who writes what to whom in which
script (cf. Fishman 1965; Pasch 2008: 99) for linguistic situations in which there is a choice
between two (or more) scripts for one language. In particular, we examined the
sociocultural conditions under which biscriptality emerges and/or continues. In order to
make it possible to isolate and generalize social factors that might play a role here, it was
necessary, apart from gathering knowledge from many different philological disciplines, to
distinguish between different types of biscriptality on the basis of sociolinguistic and
graphematic criteria. The conference met an urgent scientific need (e.g. Dale (1980: 13)
already found the analysis of social influences on script choice highly relevant and
biscriptality in this context particularly interesting, but even for Unseth (2005: 19) this is
still a neglected area within sociolinguistics).

Current state of research

After the linguists of the 18th and 19th centuries had frequently mixed up letters and sounds
and had given preference to the former over the latter, Saussure (1960 [1916]: 45,
Introduction, ch. VI, 2) placed the sound above the letter: Studying written language in
order to understand language, he argues, is as if one believed that, in order to get to know
someone, it is better to look at his photograph rather than his face. Only recently has
linguistics begun to recover from this disregard of written language. In the area of formal
linguistics, graphematics is now gradually catching up with phonology, but in
sociolinguistics, written language is still neglected. The expression sociolinguistics of
writing was used for the first time just seven years ago (Coulmas 2003: 223241),
although the enormous symbolic power of writing is perfectly well-known (just consider
the use of blackletter by Neo-Nazis but also on pub signs, or the demolition of Cyrillic and
Latin town signs in the Bosnian War).
Only against this background can the discrepancy between the research conducted on
bilingualism which has been producing concepts like diglossia, code-switching, standarddialect continuum, etc. and the neglect of biscriptality be understood. The phenomenon
itself was noticed early, though: Pierides (1875: 38) introduced the term digraphic for
monuments containing the same text twice in different scripts but in the same language,
which had formerly just be called bilinguals; Oppert (1877: 1420) for the first time
mentioned whole digraphic languages; and Barth (in Bergaigne 1893: 348) proposed the
word digraphism to describe this. However, the emergence of sociolinguistics hardly
produced any further progress in this area. This is evident from the terminological chaos:
On the one hand there is a multitude of (quasi)synonyms (e.g. digraphia, bigraphism,
bialphabetism, multigraphic situation, orthographic diglossia, etc.), and on the other hand
the term digraphia alone was invented independently six times (by Lafont 1971, Zima
1974, Jaquith 1976, Dale 1980, DeFrancis 1984 and Consani 1988/1990), which renders it
completely polysemous. Grivelet (2001) recently edited a first collection of papers on the
topic, which, however, does not provide any uniform theoretical framework either.

Methods

We applied some basic (socio)linguistic methods to the choice of scripts (thus

implementing an idea put forward by Unseth 2005) to be able to analyze socio-cultural
factors influencing this choice and the emergence of biscriptality. For example, we
distinguish between:

digraphia, a vertical situation analogous to diglossia, like in medieval

Scandinavia, where the choice of script for Old Norse depended on the function of a
text (high, prestigious texts for eternity Latin alphabet; low every-day texts
for the moment runes),
scriptal pluricentricity like in India and Pakistan, where the choice of script for the
pluricentric language Hindi-Urdu depends on the language users origin
(geographical, but here first of all religious) and is situated horizontally (Hindus
Devanagari; Muslims Arabic), and
bigraphism, a situation similar to bilingualism, like in Serbia, where everybody is
proficient in both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabet and where the choice of script
is influenced by a multitude of factors based upon the communicative situation, the
choice ultimately being relatively free.

Apart from this sociolinguistic distinction, we also have to differentiate graphematically

between scripts (or writing systems), typefaces (like blackletter and roman type) and
orthographies. This is important for the evaluation of cultural exchange within biscriptal
speech communities because a text written in a foreign script can be completely unreadable,
whereas different orthographies never seriously affect communication.
We therefore propose the following scheme of 3 3 situation types. (Underneath the
proposed terms we give an example for each situation.)
Script
Typeface
digraphia
diglyphia
medieval Scandinavia: Russian (18th/19th c.):
vertical
runes vs. Latin
Old Cyrillic vs. civil
alphabet
script
scriptal
typeface pluricentricity
pluricentricity
horizontal
Chinese:
Hindi-Urdu:
simplified vs. traditional
Devanagari vs. Arabic
free

bigraphism
Serbian:
Cyrillic vs. Latin

biglyphism
German (14641941):
blackletter vs. roman type

Orthography
diorthographia
medieval Novgorod:
standard vs. vernacular
orthogr. pluricentricity
English:
color vs. colour etc.
biorthographism
Belarusian:
Narkomaka vs.
Tarakevica

Works cited
Bergaigne, Abel. 1893. Inscriptions sanscrites du Cambodge [edited and commented by
Auguste Barth]. Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothque Nationale et autres
bibliothques 27(1). 293588.
Consani, Carlo. 1988. Bilinguismo, diglossia e digrafia nella Grecia antica I:
Considerazioni sulle iscrizioni bilingui di Cipro. In: Bilinguismo e biculturalismo nel

mondo antico: Atti del Colloquio interdisciplinare tenutoa Pisa il 28 e 29 settembre 1987.
Ed. Enrico Campanile, Giorgio R. Cardona, Romano Lazzeroni. Pisa: Giardini. 3560.
Consani, Carlo. 1990. Bilinguismo, diglossia e digrafia nella Grecia antica III: Le iscrizioni
digrafe cipriote.Orientamenti linguistici 25. 6379.
Coulmas, Florian. 2003. Writing systems:An introduction to their linguistic analysis.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dale, Ian R. H. 1980. Digraphia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 26. 5
13.
DeFrancis, John. 1984. Digraphia. Word 35. 5966.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1965. Who speaks what language to whom and when?, Linguistics 2.
6788.
Grivelet, Stphane (ed.). 2001. Digraphia: Writing systems and society. International
Journal of the Sociology of Language 150.
Jaquith, James R. 1976. Digraphia in advertising: The public as guinea pig. Visible
Language 10(4). 295308.
Lafont, Robert. 1971. Un problme de culpabilit sociologique: La diglossie francooccitane, Langue franaise 9(1). 9399.
Oppert, Jules. 1877. [Review of] Franois Lenormant, tudes sur quelques parties des
syllabaires cuniformes, Paris 1877; idem, Les syllabaires cuniformes, Paris 1877.
Gttingische gelehrte Anzeigen 1877(4546). 14091449.
Pasch, Helma. 2008. Competing scripts: The introduction of the Roman alphabet in Africa.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language 191. 65109.
Pierides, Demetrios. 1875. On a digraphic inscription found in Larnaca. Transactions of the
Society of Biblical Archaeology 4(1). 3843.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique gnrale. Ed. Charles Bally, Albert
Sechehaye. Paris: Payot.
Unseth, Peter. 2005. Sociolinguistic parallels between choosing scripts and languages.
Written Language & Literacy 8(1). 1942.
Zima, Petr. 1974. Digraphia: The case of Hausa. Linguistics 124. 5769.

In sociolinguistics, digraphia refers to the use of more than one writing system for the same
language.[1] Some scholars differentiate between synchronic digraphia with the coexistence
of two or more writing systems for the same language and diachronic (or sequential)
digraphia with the replacement of one writing system by another for a particular language.
[2] An example of synchronic digraphia is Hindi-Urdu, which is written in the Devanagari
script (mostly in India) or the Perso-Arabic script (mostly in Pakistan); an example of
diachronic digraphia is Turkish, which replaced an Arabic-based writing system with a
Latin-based system in 1928. Digraphia has implications in language planning, language
policy, and language ideology.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Terminology
o 1.1 Etymology
o 1.2 History
o 1.3 Neologizers
o 1.4 Usage
* 2 Theoretical aspects
* 3 Synchronic digraphia
* 4 Diachronic digraphia
* 5 References
* 6 External links
[edit] Terminology
Digraphia "using two writing systems for the same language" is an uncommon term,
generally restricted to linguistic contexts.
[edit] Etymology
English digraphia, like French digraphie, etymologically derives from Greek di- - "twice"
and -graphia - "writing".
Digraphia was modeled upon diglossia "the coexistence of two languages or dialects among
a certain population", which derives from Greek diglossos "bilingual." Charles
A. Ferguson, a founder of sociolinguistics, coined diglossia in 1959.[3] Grivelet analyzes
how the influence of diglossia on the unrelated notion of digraphia has "introduced some
distortion in the process of defining digraphia," such as distinguishing "high" and "low"
varieties.[4] Peter Unseth notes one usage of "digraphia" that most closely parallels
Fergusons diglossia, situations where a language uses different scripts for different
domains; for instance, "shorthand in English, pinyin in Chinese for alphabetizing library
files, etc. or several scripts which are replaced by Roman script during e-mail usage."[5]
[edit] History
The Oxford English Dictionary, which does not yet include digraphia, enters two digraph
terms and digraphic.[6] First, the linguistic term digraph is defined as, "A group of two
letters expressing a simple sound of speech". This meaning applies to both two letters
representing a single speech sound in orthography (e.g., English ng representing the velar
nasal //) and a single grapheme with two letters in typographical ligature (e.g., the Old
English Latin alphabet letter ). Second, the graph theory term digraph (a portmanteau
from directed graph) is defined as, "A graph in which each line has a direction associated

with it; a finite, non-empty set of elements together with a set of ordered pairs of these
elements." The two digraph terms were first recorded in 1788 and 1955, respectively. The
OED2 defines two digraphic meanings, "Pertaining to or of the nature of a digraph" and
"Written in two different characters or alphabets." It gives their earliest examples in 1873
and 1880 (which was used meaning "digraphia"). Isaac Hollister Hall, an American scholar
of Oriental studies, described an Eteocypriot language publication as "bilingual (or
digraphic, as both inscriptions are in the same language)."[7] Hall's article was antedated by
Demetrios Pieridis's 1875 usage of digraphic instead of bilingual for an inscription written
in both the Greek alphabet and Cypriot syllabary.[8]
English digraphic and digraphia were contemporaneous with their corresponding terms in
French linguistics. In 1877, Julius Oppert introduced digraphique to describe languages
written in cuneiform syllabaries.[9] In 1893, Auguste Barth used French digraphisme for
Cambodian inscriptions written in Khmer script and Brhm script.[10] In 1971, Robrt
Lafont coined digraphie regarding the sociolinguistics of French and Occitan.[11]
Although the word "digraphia" is new, the practice is ancient. Darius the Great's (c. 522486 BCE) Behistun Inscription was written in three cuneiform scripts for Old Persian,
Elamite, and Babylonian.[12]
[edit] Neologizers
Four authors independently neologized English digraphia from diglossia.
The Songhay linguist Petr Zima (1974) first used "digraphia" to describe the Hausa
language having two writing systems, Boko (Latin alphabet) and Ajami script (Arabic
alphabet).[13] Zima differentiated these paired situations.
* Digraphia: "Two types of written form of one language co-exist, based upon the usage
of two distinct graphical systems (scripts) by the respective language community."
* Diorthographia: "Two types of written form of a particular language co-exist, using the
same script, but they are based upon the usage of two distinct orthographies by the same
language community."[14]
Usage of "diorthographia" is unusual. Compare dysgraphia meaning "a language disorder
that affects a person's ability to write" and dysorthographia "a synonym for dyslexia".
The anthropologist James R. Jaquith (1976), who studied unconventional spelling in
advertising, used "digraphia" to describe the practice of writing brand names in all caps
(e.g., ARRID). He described digraphia as "the graphic analog of what linguists call
diglossia", and defined it as "different versions of a written language exist simultaneously
and in complementary distribution in a speech community."[15]
The sociolinguist Ian R. H. Dale (1980) wrote a general survey of digraphia, defined as,
"the use of two (or more) writing systems to represent varieties of a single language."[16]
The sinologist and lexicographer John DeFrancis (1984) used digraphia, defined as "the use
of two or more different systems of writing the same language," to translate Chinese
shuangwenzhi ( "two-script system") of writing in Chinese characters and Pinyin.
[17] DeFrancis later explained, "I have been incorrectly credited with coining the term

digraphia, which I indeed thought I had created as a parallel in writing to Charles

Fergusons diglossia in speech."[18]
[edit] Usage
Digraphia is an uncommon term in current English usage. For instance, the Corpus of
Contemporary American English, which includes over 425,000,000 words, lists digraphia
three times in "academic genre" contexts.
Stphane Grivelet, who edited a special "Digraphia: Writing systems and society" issue of
the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, explains.[19]
After 25 years and various articles on the subject, there are still important differences in
the scope of the definition, and the notion itself is rarely used in sociolinguistics, apart from
the field of Chinese studies, where the notion of digraphia is nowadays frequently used to
describe the coexistence of two writing systems: Chinese script and Pinyin.[20]
Digraphia has some rare synonyms. Orthographic diglossia antedates digraphia, and was
noted by Paul Wexler in 1971."[21] Bigraphism, bialphabetism, and biscriptality are
infrequently used.
Some scholars avoid using the word "digraphia". Describing terminology for "script
obsolescence," Stephen D. Houston, John Baines, and Jerrold Cooper say, "'Biscript' refers
to a text in two different writing systems. 'Biliteracy' and 'triliteracy' label the concurrent
use of two or three scripts."[22]
[edit] Theoretical aspects
Digraphia can be either "synchronic" (or "concurrent") or "diachronic" ("historical" or
"sequential"),[23] extending Ferdinand de Saussure's classic division between synchronic
linguistics and diachronic linguistics. Dale first differentiated "diachronic (or historical)
digraphia" ("more than one writing system used for a given language in successive periods
of time") and "synchronic digraphia" ("more than one writing system used
contemporaneously for the same language").[24] Dale concluded that,
Two primary factors have been identified as operating on a society in the choice of script
for representing its language. These are the prevailing cultural influence (often a religion)
and the prevailing political influence of the period in which the choice is made. Synchronic
digraphia results when more than one such influence is operating and none can dominate all
groups of speakers of the language in question [ ] Diachronic digraphia results when
different influences prevail over a given speech community at different times.[25]
Some recent scholarship questions the practicality of this synchronic/diachronic distinction.
Grivelet contends that, "digraphia is a single sociolinguistic process with two types of
outcome (concurrent or sequential digraphia) and with specific features related to the causes
and types of development of the various cases.[26]
Peter Unseth lists and exemplifies four factors that can influence a language community's
choice of a script.[27]
1. "To identify themselves with a group." In the 1940s, Mongolia replaced the traditional
Mongolian script first briefly with the Mongolian Latin alphabet and then, under Soviet

influence, with the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet. From the 1980s, the Mongolian script was
reintroduced into schools for its historical and cultural importance.
2. "To distance themselves from a group." In the mid-19th century, the LDS Church
developed and promoted the Deseret alphabet for English. Brigham Young publicly claimed
it was more phonetically accurate than Latin script and would facilitate learning to read and
write English. However, historian David Bigler says the Deseret alphabet "demonstrated
cultural exclusivism, an important consideration. It also kept secrets from curious nonMormons, [and] controlled what children would be allowed to read."[28]
3. Participation in developments on a broader scale. The choice of a script can influence a
group's preparedness to interact with other regional or international groups. For instance,
the Hmong language has numerous alternate writing systems. Hmong who live in Southeast
Asia prefer the indigenous Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA) or the Pahawh Hmong
semi-syllabary; Hmong expatriates who live in the United States prefer to romanize names
differently, such as Latin Hmong instead of RPA Hmoob.
4. "Linguistic considerations." Sometimes a foreign script is rejected because it is
unsuitable for the phonetics of a language. Korean was first written in logographic Hanja
Chinese characters, but king Sejong the Great promulgated the Hangul alphabet, which is
better suited for transcribing Korean phonology. In the present day, South Korean uses both
Hanja logographs and Hangul letters, while North Korea uses only Hangul.
Linguists who study language and gender have analyzed gender-differentiated speech
varieties ("genderlects", usually spoken by women), and there are a few cases of scripts
predominantly used by women. Japanese hiragana was initially a women's script, for
instance, used by Murasaki Shikibu to write The Tale of Genji. Chinese Nshu script
(literally "women's writing) is a simplification of characters that was traditionally used by
women in Jiangyong County of Hunan province.[29]
Not only scripts, but also letters can have iconic power to differentiate social groups. For
example, the names of many heavy metal bands (e.g., Motrhead, Infernl Mjesty, Mtley
Cre) use umlauts "to index the musical genre as well as the notion of Gothic more
generally."[30] This digraphic usage is called the "metal umlaut" (or "rck dts").
[edit] Synchronic digraphia
A modern example of synchronic digraphia is writing Serbo-Croatian in both Gaj's Latin
alphabet and Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. Although most Serbian and Croatian speakers can
read and write both alphabetizations, Latin letters are largely used by Roman Catholic
Croatians and Cyrillic letters largely used by Orthodox Serbians.[31]
The Japanese writing system has unusually complex digraphia. William C. Hannas
distinguishes two digraphic forms of Japanese: "true digraphia" of occasionally using
rmaji Latin alphabet for a few loanwords like DVD, and of regularly using three scripts
(technically, "trigraphia") for different functions. Japanese is written with kanji "Chinese
character" logographs used for Sino-Japanese vocabulary; hiragana used for native
Japanese words; and katakana used for foreign borrowings or graphic emphasis.[32] Take
Nihon for instance, the primary name of Japan. It is normally written (literally, "sun's
origin") in kanji but is occasionally written in hiragana, in katakana, or
Nihon in rmaji ("romanization"). Japanese users having a certain amount of flexibility in
choosing between scripts, and their choices can have social meaning.[33]

Another example is the Malay language, which most often uses the Latin alphabet, while in
certain geographic areas (Kelantan state of Malaysia, Brunei) it is also written with an
adapted Arabic alphabet called Jawi.
An element of synchronic digraphia is present in many languages not using the Latin script,
in particular in text messages and when typing on a computer which does not have the
facility to represent the usual script for that language. In such cases, Latin script is often
used, although systems of transcription are often not standardised.
Digraphia is controversial in modern Written Chinese. The ongoing debate on traditional
and simplified Chinese characters concerns "diglyphia" or "pluricentricity" rather than
digraphia. Chinese digraphia involves the use of both Chinese characters and Hanyu Pinyin
romanization. Pinyin is officially approved for a few special uses, such as annotating
characters for learners of Chinese and transcribing Chinese names.[34] Nevertheless, Pinyin
continues to be adopted for other functions, such as computers, education, library catalogs,
and merchandise labels.[35] Among Chinese input methods for computers, Pinyin is the
most popular phonetic method. Zhou Youguang predicts, "Digraphia is perhaps the key for
Chinese to enter the age of Information processing."[36] Many writers, both from China
(e.g., Mao Dun and Zhou Youguang) and from abroad (e.g., John DeFrancis, Victor H.
Mair, J. Marshall Unger, and William Hannas[37]) have argued for digraphia to be
implemented as a Chinese language standard. These digraphic reformers call for a
generalized used of Pinyin orthography along with Chinese characters. Yat-Shing Cheung
differentiates three Chinese digraphic situations. (1) Both the High and the Low forms
derive from the same script system: traditional and simplified characters. (2) Both forms
derive from the same system but the Low form borrows foreign elements: Putonghua and
topolects (or "dialects"). (3) The High and the Low forms derive from two different script
systems: Chinese characters and pinyin.[38]
[edit] Diachronic digraphia
"Diachronic" or "sequential digraphia", in which a language switches writing systems, can
occur historically through language change or suddenly through language reform. "Abrupt
script shift can be seen in the change of Turkish from Arabic script to Roman (in one year),
while a gradual change of script can be seen in the change from writing Korean in Chinese
characters to Hangul (a process that arguably nearly spanned five centuries)."[39]
The Azerbaijani language provides an "extreme example" of diachronic digraphia; it has
historically been written in runic, Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin alphabets.[40]
There are many examples where a language used to be written in a script, that was replaced
later. Examples are Romanian (which originally used Cyrillic then changed to Latin);
Turkish and Kiswahili began with the Arabic then Latin, and many languages of former
Soviet Central Asia, which abandoned the Cyrillic script after the dissolution of the USSR.
DeFrancis notes, "The old literature in the earlier scripts remains, however, so that all these
scripts more or less overlap in use, by scholars involved with early texts, or for reprinting
earlier materials for a wider readership and for other limited uses."[41]