Diglossia and Language Learning

After reading my blog of 29 January about the frustrations of trying to learn Malay in Brunei because people here are unwilling to speak the language to me, my UBD colleague Sue Nair observed that she faced similar problems when trying to learn Arabic in Bahrain.

It is interesting that, just like Brunei, the Arab world exhibits widespread diglossia: Standard Arabic occurs in formal situations, and it is also the variety that is usually taught to foreigners; but in ordinary conversational settings, a more colloquial dialect is generally used. (For more on diglossia, including a discussion of how teachers in Singapore can deal with the coexistence of Standard English and Singlish, see my short article on the topic.)

Maybe people's reluctance in Bahrain to speak Arabic to foreigners is partly because they do not feel comfortable using Standard Arabic in a conversational setting, and in some cases they may not be very proficient in the standard language. And I wonder whether difficulties for foreigners to learn the local language might be quite common in diglossic societies.