state of strong diglossia, while those whose linguistic lives are spent entirely (or mostly) in one or the other are weakly diglossic. There are, in fact, people in Catalonia (both in the working class that has immigrated from elsewhere in Spain and the native aristocracy that looked to Madrid for inspiration) who have never bothered to learn Catalan, spoken or written. (The converse, though it exists, is rare.) But for most Catalonians(10) the situation is rather muddled. In particular, younger people of the Barcelona middle class are equally fluent in Catalan and Spanish oral and written use, so that their situation is the peculiar one of bilingual weak diglossia weak by definition, because they dont think of the colloquial and formal versions of either language as distinct language varieties. Teaching the language The tendency, in societies with more-or-less universal schooling, of diglossia to metamorphose from strong to weak (by either of the two processes outlined above) illustrates something like a social analogue to the second law of thermodynamics: weak diglossia represents greater uniformity, and hence higher entropy, than strong diglossia. I dont know enough economic theory to know if there is a corresponding economic law, but it also appears that in terms of educational resource allocation, weak diglossia is cheaper. Teaching the standard in a situation of strong diglossia is, at least at first, like teaching a foreign language, and requires a corresponding effort, including teachers with special qualifications, and the recognition that a whole new code has to be taught at the same time that literacy is first introduced. It certainly seems easier to teach children how to read and write words that they already know. Of course, appearances can deceive. I recall that, when I lived in France over forty years ago, it was reported that the highest scores on the baccalaureat exams (largely measured by the ability to write formal French) were attained by Alsatians and Corsicans, who at that time were still strongly diglossic. I remember thinking at the time that this was precisely because they learned standard French as a quasi-foreign language, with little chance of its being contaminated through a prior use of colloquial French.(11) I compared this process to my own experience of learning English (which is now my primary language) from scratch at the age of ten; I learned every word simultaneously in its spoken and written form, and consequently I make no spelling errors. I had also mastered the rules of standard English grammar before I learned to speak the vernacular in colloquial fashion, and I daresay that I use standard English more grammatically than most native speakers (Chomskys theories to the contrary notwithstanding). The previously quoted comments by older Corsicans, comparing their own mastery of (standard) French with that of their juniors, are another case in point, as is the fact that the French of some people from Haiti or the French West Indies [whose vernacular is Creole] appears stilted or excessively formal to speakers from France.(12) In French-speaking societies, the differences between formal and informal language are more sharply marked than