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

Revista Estudios Ingleses 17 (2004)
As for PHONOLOGY, the phonological system of both codes
may be defi ned as either close or distant, that is to say, with
moderate or strong signs of divergence. English and French
exhibit moderate signs of divergence and so do Castilian and
Galician (the vowel system contains fi ve vowels whereas in
Galician there are seven vowels).
These Fergusonian assumptions can be used to describe the
situation in post-conquest England and post-war Galicia. It is,
thus, acceptable to call these communities ‘diglossic communities’
on broad terms. All in all, later authors went deeper into
the study of this sociolinguistic notion.
Fasold’s revision (1990: 53) of the basic concept of diglosssia
expressed by Ferguson sheds new light on the comparison of
the speech communities under survey. He states that diglossia
is the reservation of highly valued segments of a community’s
linguistic repertoire (which are not the first to be learned, but
are learned later and more consciously, usually through formal
education), for situations perceived as more formal […]; and the
reservation of less highly valued segments (which are learned first
with little or no conscious effort), of any degree of linguistic relatedness
to the higher valued segments, from stylistic differences
to separate languages, for situations perceived as more informal
and intimate.
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