Digraphia

Theoretical aspects

Digraphia can be either "synchronic" (or "concurrent") or "diachronic" ("historical" or "sequential"), extending Ferdinand de Saussure's classic division between synchronic linguistics and diachronic linguistics. Dale first differentiated "diachronic (or historical) digraphia" ("more than one writing system used for a given language in successive periods of time") and "synchronic digraphia" ("more than one writing system used contemporaneously for the same language"). Dale concluded that,

Two primary factors have been identified as operating on a society in the choice of script for representing its language. These are the prevailing cultural influence (often a religion) and the prevailing political influence of the period in which the choice is made. Synchronic digraphia results when more than one such influence is operating and none can dominate all groups of speakers of the language in question [ … ] Diachronic digraphia results when different influences prevail over a given speech community at different times.

Some recent scholarship questions the practicality of this synchronic/diachronic distinction. Grivelet contends that, "digraphia is a single sociolinguistic process with two types of outcome (concurrent or sequential digraphia) and with specific features related to the causes and types of development of the various cases.

Peter Unseth lists and exemplifies four factors that can influence a language community's choice of a script.

1. "To identify themselves with a group." In the 1940s, Mongolia replaced the traditional Mongolian script first briefly with the Mongolian Latin alphabet and then, under Soviet influence, with the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet. From the 1980s, the Mongolian script was reintroduced into schools for its historical and cultural importance.
2. "To distance themselves from a group." In the mid-19th century, the LDS Church developed and promoted the Deseret alphabet for English. Brigham Young publicly claimed it was more phonetically accurate than Latin script and would facilitate learning to read and write English. However, historian David Bigler says the Deseret alphabet "demonstrated cultural exclusivism, an important consideration. It also kept secrets from curious non-Mormons, [and] controlled what children would be allowed to read."
3. Participation in developments on a broader scale. The choice of a script can influence a group's preparedness to interact with other regional or international groups. For instance, the Hmong language has numerous alternate writing systems. Hmong who live in Southeast Asia prefer the indigenous Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA) or the Pahawh Hmong semi-syllabary; Hmong expatriates who live in the United States prefer to romanize names differently, such as Latin Hmong instead of RPA Hmoob.
4. "Linguistic considerations." Sometimes a foreign script is rejected because it is unsuitable for the phonetics of a language. Korean was first written in logographic Hanja Chinese characters, but king Sejong the Great promulgated the Korean alphabet, which is better suited for transcribing Korean phonology. In the present day, North Korea uses only the alphabet, which it calls Chosŏn'gŭl. South Korea uses both Hanja and the alphabet, which it calls Hangul. The different names of the alphabet reflect the different names of Korea.

Linguists who study language and gender have analyzed gender-differentiated speech varieties ("genderlects", usually spoken by women), and there are a few cases of scripts predominantly used by women. Japanese hiragana was initially a women's script, for instance, used by Murasaki Shikibu to write The Tale of Genji. Chinese Nüshu script (literally "women's writing”) is a simplification of characters that was traditionally used by women in Jiangyong County of Hunan province.

Not only scripts, but also letters can have iconic power to differentiate social groups. For example, the names of many heavy metal bands (e.g., Motörhead, Infernäl Mäjesty, Mötley Crüe) use umlauts "to index the musical genre as well as the notion of 'Gothic' more generally." This digraphic usage is called the "metal umlaut" (or "röck döts").

Synchronic digraphia

Synchronic digraphia is the coexistence of two or more writing systems for the same language. A modern example is the Serbo-Croatian language, which is written in either the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet or Gaj's Latin alphabet. Although most speakers can read and write both scripts, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks generally use Latin, while Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins generally use Cyrillic. However, older indigenous scripts were used much earlier, most notably Bosnian Cyrillic. Inuktitut is also officially digraphic, using both Latin and Inuktitut syllabics. In Hindustani, the Devanagari or Urdu script generally follows the Hindi and Urdu standards and the speaker's religious affiliation, though Urdu is sometimes written in Devanagari in India. Digraphia is limited, however, in that most people know only one script. Similarly, depending on which side of the Punjab border a Punjabi language speaker lives in, India or Pakistan, and religious affiliation, they will use the Gurmukhi or Shahmukhi script respectively. The former shares similarities with Devanagari and the latter is essentially a derivative of the Urdu writing script (Perso-Arabic). The Arvanitic dialect of Albanian is written in both the Greek alphabet and Latin (Δασκαρίνα Πινότσ̈ι/Dhaskarina Pinoçi.)

The Japanese writing system has unusually complex digraphia. William C. Hannas distinguishes two digraphic forms of Japanese: "true digraphia" of occasionally using rōmaji Latin alphabet for a few loanwords like DVD, and of regularly using three scripts (technically, "trigraphia") for different functions. Japanese is written with kanji "Chinese character" logographs used for both Sino-Japanese vocabulary as well as native vocabulary; hiragana used for native Japanese words without kanji or difficult kanji, and for grammatical endings; and katakana used for foreign borrowings or graphic emphasis. Nihon, for instance, the primary name of Japan, is normally written 日本 (lit. "sun's origin") in kanji – but is occasionally written にほん in hiragana, ニホン in katakana, or Nihon in rōmaji ("romanization"). Japanese users have a certain amount of flexibility in choosing between scripts, and their choices can have social meaning.

Another example is the Malay language, which most often uses the Latin alphabet, while in certain geographic areas (Kelantan state of Malaysia, Brunei) it is also written with an adapted Arabic alphabet called Jawi. Adaptations of the Arabic script are also widely used across the Malay Archipelago since the introduction of Islam. In Java, Javanese people, which were predominantly ruled by Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms, have their own writing system, called Hanacaraka. When the Islamic power took place, a modified Arabic writing system (called Pegon) was introduced, along with the massive introduction of the Latin alphabet by western colonialists. This results in the use of three writing systems to write modern Javanese, either based on a particular context (religious, cultural or normal), or sometimes also written simultaneously. This phenomenon also occurred in some other cultures in Indonesia.

An element of synchronic digraphia is present in many languages not using the Latin script, in particular in text messages and when typing on a computer which does not have the facility to represent the usual script for that language. In such cases, Latin script is often used, although systems of transcription are often not standardised.

Digraphia is controversial in modern Written Chinese. The ongoing debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters concerns "diglyphia" or "pluricentricity" rather than digraphia. Chinese digraphia involves the use of both Chinese characters and Hanyu Pinyin romanization. Pinyin is officially approved for a few special uses, such as annotating characters for learners of Chinese and transcribing Chinese names. Nevertheless, Pinyin continues to be adopted for other functions, such as computers, education, library catalogs, and merchandise labels. Among Chinese input methods for computers, Pinyin is the most popular phonetic method. Zhou Youguang predicts, "Digraphia is perhaps the key for Chinese to enter the age of Information processing." Many writers, both from China (e.g., Mao Dun and Zhou Youguang) and from abroad (e.g., John DeFrancis, Victor H. Mair, J. Marshall Unger, and William Hannas) have argued for digraphia to be implemented as a Chinese language standard. These digraphic reformers call for a generalized use of Pinyin orthography along with Chinese characters. Yat-Shing Cheung differentiates three Chinese digraphic situations. (1) Both the High and the Low forms derive from the same script system: traditional and simplified characters. (2) Both forms derive from the same system but the Low form borrows foreign elements: Putonghua and Fangyan. (3) The High and the Low forms derive from two different script systems: Chinese characters and pinyin.

Other examples of synchronic digraphia:

• Balinese was written in the Balinese script especially in palm-leaf manuscripts for religious purposes. However, similar to Javanese, it is now largely written in Latin. Attempts to popularize the script through counseling and using it public spaces are supported by the local government.
• Javanese was written in the Javanese script, but is now largely written in Latin. Attempts to reintroduce the Javanese script are gaining popularity. The use of Pegon is limited to pesantren, traditional Islamic boarding schools.
• Kashmiri is written in Sharada, Devanagari, Nastaliq, and Latin scripts.
• Kazakh is written in Arabic in Xinjiang; in Kazakhstan, it is written in Cyrillic (though, in an instance of diachronic digraphia, it is slated to be replaced there by Latin in 2025).
• Konkani is written in five scripts: Devanagari, Kannada, Latin, Malayalam and Perso-Arabic.
• Marathi was historically written simultaneously in Balbodh Devanagari and Modi script until the 1940s, after which Devanagari was preferred over Modi script due to a lack of printing infrastructure for the latter.
• Persian is today written in the Perso-Arabic script in Iran (where the language is called Farsi) and in Afghanistan (where it is called Dari), but in Cyrillic in Tajikistan (called Tajik).
• Punjabi uses two different writing systems: the Brahmic Gurmukhi script used in Indian Punjab, and the Perso-Arabic Shahmukhi used in Pakistani Punjab.
• Sundanese now largely written in Latin, was written in both the Sundanese script and the Javanese script. The reintroduction of the Sundanese script has gained popularity in recent years.
• Tashelhit was historically written in Perso-Arabic and there are still people who use it. The Latin script is mostly common among people, while the Tifinagh script is the official script but not widely found outside of official uses.
• Uzbek was written in the Cyrillic script from the 1940s until 1993, when a Latin-based alphabet was made official in Uzbekistan. While the Latin-based alphabet is widely used online, As of 2024 the Cyrillic alphabet is just as common on the Internet and is still the main script of most of the printed media, with most people able to read both much as in Serbia.

Diachronic digraphia

Diachronic or sequential digraphia, in which a language switches writing systems, can occur gradually through language change or more quickly though language reform. Turkish switched from Arabic script to Latin within one year, under reforms ordered by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, while the transition from writing Korean in Chinese characters to writing in Hangul took hundreds of years.

There are many examples of languages that used to be written in a script, which was replaced later. Examples are Romanian (which originally used Cyrillic and changed to Latin) in the 1860s; Vietnamese (which switched from a form of Chinese writing called Chữ Nôm to the Latin alphabet); Turkish, Swahili, Somali, and (partially) Malay, which all switched from Arabic script to the Latin alphabet, and many countries of the former Soviet Union, which abandoned the Cyrillic script after the dissolution of the USSR such as Moldova, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan which all switched from Cyrillic to Latin. As old literature in the earlier scripts remains, there is typically some continuing overlap in use, by scholars studying earlier texts, reprinting of earlier materials for contemporary readers and other limited uses.

The Azerbaijani language provides an extreme example of diachronic digraphia; it has historically been written in Old Turkic, Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic, and again Latin alphabets.

Other examples of diachronic digraphia:

• In Kazakhstan, Kazakh is written in Cyrillic, but a switch to Latin has been scheduled to take place in 2025.
• Malay was traditionally written in Jawi, but that has now been largely replaced by Latin.
• Since 2025, the Mongolian government has made the traditional Mongolian script co-official with the previously used Cyrillic script to write the Mongolian language.

Relevant literature

• Iyengar, Arvind. 2021. A diachronic analysis of Sindhi multiscriptality. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 6.1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2019-0027