While diglossia as a field of research or even the concept might have flowered long past Caldwell its quite inconceivable that Caldwell would have been unaware of this diglossia Infact in speaking about the difficulty that the untrained or sometimes even the trained Tamil and I certainly and strongly feel that he is talking about people who have received their training in Tamil Nadu I do nt think he would have based his views or book on somebody who learnt or spoke Tamil in say Germany or France in the mid 19th century faces Caldwell is speaking about nothing but diglossia maybe without putting it down in as many words Be that as it may what studies in diglossia in Tamil over the last several decades would have done is merely deal with the problem in greater detail and throw light on such things as the causes for diglossia evolution perpetuation etc of this phenomenon over the centuries and other things of academic interest like that What I am trying to say is while scientific interest and research into diglossia might be a development of the last few decades diglossia in tamil existed nonetheless even before that And like I said Caldwell has only touched upon it though not gone deeper into it to research the more intricate details of it Notwithstanding that the fact remains that the ordinary Tamil especially one without formal or informal training is often at a loss to understand Classical tamil enough to fully appreciate its beauty so imo the lines that are already there should be retained as it is But you should also before those lines preferably make a mention of the diglossia that exists in Tamil the different levels the continuum etc and then conclude that as a result of the said diglossia the ordinary Tamil sometimes even with formal training is at a loss to understand the language of classical literature or the other diglossic levels And to answer Sundar s question as to whether I feel this is limited to just Tamil or is also a feature of other languages While I do nt a professional grade knowledge of any language I ve had formal schooling in both Kannada and Hindi And I ve observed this feature in both languages much more so in Kannada In Kannada in fact if you were to study the Mankutimmana Kagga written sometime in the 60s or 70s i guess by D V Gundappa the language used is somewhat in haLegannaDa style though I would say it does nt sound as haLe old as haLegannada I am able to understand this work for the most part except in some places where it gets a little too much for me and I might have to refer to the dictionary Any literature regardless of when it was written but written in pure haLegannada style I would say would nt make much sense to the untrained eye or ear With Hindi probably because the language is much younger than Kannada or Tamil though I ve observed a sort of diglossia say in the language that Kabir employs verses that of Munshi or someone Kabir is far more discernable to me than say the Kavirajamarga would be to me or probably Kural to you In general I feel some degree of diglossia almost always exists in most languages atleast Indian languages in that the lingo employed by news readers say atleast in the good old Doordarshan only days is removed from the one you would hear on the street Talking of newsreaders and the lingo on street I just remembered an interesting thing about the Kannada spoken by the people of South Kanara It is almost exactly like the one employed in the news or in formal documents in that they speak much the same way they and the rest of Karnataka would write I am not sure if there s a parallel to this in Tamil or any other language that I have any knowledge of