Diasystem - Origin of The Concept

Origin of The Concept

Trubetzkoy (1931) first suggested comparing accents by their synchronic states, rather than by comparing their different historical developments. He classified sound differences between dialects into three types:

• Phonological: the inventory phonemes and contextual restrictions, which may vary between dialects. For example, speakers of Castilian Spanish have the phonemes /θ/ and /s/, while most American dialects have just the latter.
• Phonetic: how phonemes are realized phonetically. For example, most dialects of English have strongly aspirated /p t k/ in words like park, tool, and cat, but some Northern English accents do not feature such aspiration.
• Etymological distribution: the distribution of phonemes among member words in an interdialectal lexical correspondence set. For example, most English varieties contrast /æ/ and /ɑː/, but some use the former in words like bath and grass and others use the latter.

Despite Trubetzkoy's proposal, linguists continued to consider variation between varieties outside of the scope of inquiry of grammar construction; each variety, in their thinking, should only be studied on its own terms.

Inspired by Trubetzkoy, Weinreich (1954) proposed a synthesis of linguistic geography and descriptive linguistics by applying the structuralist concept of grammar to the description of regular correspondences between different varieties; a resulting supergrammar, which he called a diasystem, would be consistent with the individual grammars of all the member dialects. A diasystem is a higher order system and its component units of analysis would accordingly be abstractions of a higher order than the units of analysis of the individual systems. That is, just as the phones present within an individual variety are grouped together into abstract phonemes, the phonemes present within a group of varieties could be grouped together into even more abstract diaphonemes. Weinreich exemplified the diasystemic approach by a forumulaic arrangement of phoneme correspondences in three dialects of Yiddish, focusing on the vowels but arguing that the principle could work for other aspects of language.

While Weinreich did not elaborate the diasystemic approach, he did consider some theoretical pitfalls to be avoided. He he recognized that phonemic mergers and splits with dissimilar results across dialects would pose a difficult challenge for the construction of a diasystem; he cautioned against positing a diasystem when the work of creating all the member systems (e.g., the work of phonemicization) was yet incomplete; and, following the lead of Trubetzkoy (1931), he noted that the differences in phonological inventory and etymological distribution might prove problematic in the construction of diasystems.