Digraphia

In sociolinguistics, digraphia refers to the use of more than one writing system for the same language. Synchronic digraphia is the coexistence of two or more writing systems for the same language, while diachronic digraphia (or sequential digraphia) is the replacement of one writing system by another for a particular language. Hindustani, with an Urdu literary standard written in Urdu alphabet and a High Hindi standard written in Devanagari, is one of the 'textbook examples' of synchronic digraphia, cases where writing systems are used contemporaneously. An example of diachronic digraphia, where one writing system replaces another, occurs in the case of Turkish, for which the traditional Arabic writing system was replaced with a Latin-based system in 1928. Digraphia has implications in language planning, language policy, and language ideology. English digraphia, like French digraphie, etymologically derives from Greek di- δι- "twice" and -graphia -γραφία "writing". Digraphia was modeled upon diglossia "the coexistence of two languages or dialects among a certain population", which derives from Greek diglossos δίγλωσσος "bilingual." Charles A. Ferguson, a founder of sociolinguistics, coined diglossia in 1959. 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. Peter Unseth notes one usage of "digraphia" that most closely parallels Ferguson's "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 Latin script during e-mail usage." The Oxford English Dictionary, which does not yet include digraphia, enters two terms, digraph and digraphic. 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.