Diglossia (was Re: New to the List, too)

Vima Kadphises wrote:
>     As far as IALs go, some friends of mine and I have
> been discussing a tentative Arabic "interlingua,"
> (something much more comprehensible and easy to use
> than fusHa, based on modern colloquial dialects) but
> that project hasn't even entered a planning stage.
Speaking of which, has anyone created a conlang with diglossia?
Selenese, the language of the Democratic Union of Worlds, has that,
altho I've never worked out the language.  Selenese evolved out of a
creole spoken on the Moon, and has evolved in many divergent directions,
with a central committee establishing the standard form, and also a lot
of divergent local dialects/languages have arisen from it.  Planets that
are pretty much isolated tend to diverge furthest from the standard,
while planets in the middle of everything, with many tourists and
immigrants and the like tend to remain pretty close to the standard.

Of course, Selenese is not the only language spoken, there are many
languages descended from other Earth languages and creoles, as well as
languages of other species.  The DUW is no monoglot, monolithic entity.
(It's not even really a single political unit, there are regions which
are only nominally part of the DUW, and parts with greater or lesser
degrees of autonomy, and parts that are completely integrated into the
DUW)

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