Survey request

[Peter Slomanson]

VYAKARAN: South Asian Languages and Linguistics Net
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The relationship between diglossia and literacy is obviously an interesting
question, however I assume that I am not the only subscriber to this list
who finds the comments quoted below to be offensive.

Peter Slomanson
City University of New York

> Outside of the Indian subcontinent, the only languages which do this are Arabic > (literacy rate 72%) and Persian (literacy rate 80%). In Arabic there's a
> combination of religious fanaticism (they think that the H language was dictated > by God) and nationalist fanaticism (they want to try to create a maximally
> large `Arab people' united by a standard language), while for Persian they
> are using an older language because it's associated with the multinational
> empire they're trying to hold together (vs. Azeris and Kurds).