21735: Lawless: Re: 21731: Vedrine: RE: 21703: Canal: Re: 21692: Nlbo: Is Haiti a French speaking country? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Robert Lawless <robert.lawless@wichita.edu>

At 02:31 PM 5/6/2004 -0500, Vedrine wrote:
>What the 2 countries share in common is the DIGLOSSIA phenomenon (where we
>will see a dominant language in many situations, a minority group speaks "x"
>language whereas a majority one speaks "z" within the same environment /
>country).

The usual linguistic definition of diglossia is a situation in which at
least two versions of the same language are spoken by socioeconomic varying
segments of the population. French, English, and Creole are three different
languages. In Haiti French is a second language for Haitians, all of whom
speak Creole as their first language. It is not a situation that can be
described as diglossia.