What is a diglossic situation?

A diglossic situation refers to a sociolinguistic environment where two distinct varieties of a language are used by a community, typically with one variety being regarded as "high" (more formal, prestigious, and used in official settings) and the other as "low" (more informal, used in everyday conversation). This often occurs in multilingual societies where the high variety is used in education, literature, and formal discourse, while the low variety is employed in casual communication. A classic example is the use of Modern Standard Arabic in formal contexts alongside various regional dialects in everyday speech.