diglossia

Diglossia and modern art

In linguistics, diglossia is a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety (labeled "L" or "low" variety), a second, highly codified variety (labeled "H" or "high") is used in certain situations such as literature, formal education, or other specific settings, but not used for ordinary conversation.^[1] In most cases, the H variety has no native speakers.

The high variety may be an older stage of the same language (as in medieval Europe, where Latin remained in formal use even as colloquial speech diverged), an unrelated language, or a distinct yet closely related present day dialect (e.g. Standard German alongside Low German; or Chinese, with Mandarin as the official, literary standard and local varieties of Chinese used in everyday communication). Other examples include literary Katharevousa versus spoken Demotic Greek; literary Tamil versus spoken Tamil and Indonesian, with its Baku and Gaul forms;^[2] and literary versus spoken Welsh.

With appropriate modification this binari sm may be useful in characterizing the art of the twentieth century, so often regarded as THE modernist century, with its procession of postimpressionism, fauvism, cubism, abstraction and so forth.