Морфология

ertain characteristics that they ascribe to it: its beauty, logic, and richness. Classical Arabic is also the language of the Quran. Ferguson has pointed out that choosing one colloquial variety of Arabic to elevate above all others poses a number of problems. Almost certainly, any Arab will tell you that the variety he or she speaks is the best, so there would be considerable disagreement about where one should begin any attempt to standardize modern Arabic on a single colloquial variety. There is, however, a consensus among Arabs that any standard that may eventually emerge will be a version of the H variety developed to meet modern needs and purged of regional peculiarities and foreign impurities.

While acknowledging that diglossic situations are essentially stable, Ferguson did predict what he thought the future held for the situations he examined. He regarded the situation in Switzerland as relatively stable. In Haiti, there would be a slow development of Haitian Creole based on the L variety of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Finally, in Greece the standard would be based on the L variety of Athens with considerable admixture of vocabulary from Katharévousa.

What Ferguson describes are narrow or classic diglossic situations. They require the use of very divergent varieties of the same language and there are few good examples. Fishman has broadened or extended the term to include a wider variety of language situations. For Fishman diglossia is an enduring societal arrangement, extending at least beyond a three generation period, such that two "languages" each have their secure, phenomenologically legitimate and widely implemented functions. By acknowledging that his use of the term language also includes sub-varieties of one language,