English and Galician in the Middle Ages - Publicaciones ...

English and Galician in the Middle Ages:
A Sociohistorical Survey
Begoña Crespo García
supporting its mother tongue is constantly making an effort
to speak Castilian outside ordinary conversation in order to
imitate prestigious sectors.
As has been mentioned, the co-existence of two linguistic
systems in the same area opens the possibility for the use of
one or the other to be conditioned by external circumstances.
The phenomenon of diglossia emerges in this environment as
an “enduring societal arrangement” (Romaine, 1989: 35) and
in this sense diglossia differs from bilingualism but is inevitably
connected with it.
In order to see how the notion of diglossia works in the two
speech communities in question, we will use the theoretical
premises put forward by authors such as Ferguson (1959),
Fishman (1979) or Fasold (1987). The primary conception
of Ferguson’s diglossia (1959) is particularly concerned with
dialectal varieties but was superseded by wider conceptions
such as Fishman’s whole language diglossia (1979) and,
more recently, by Fasold’s broad diglossia (1987). Ferguson’s
defi nition fails to be totally appropriate for our examples since
we are not dealing with varieties but with languages and their
contexts of usage are not strictly restricted to the double relation
power-formal style and absence of power-informal style.
CONTENTS
29