ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that the main orientations in the study of language contact have tended to involve typologies and perspectives which set great limitations upon what can be said about the inherent conflict between language groups that is a feature of language contact. The work of Ferguson and Fishman, in the form of the concepts of domain and diglossia, has become axiomatic in the sociology of language, when, his view, they tend to be more of a hindrance than a help in analysing language contact. They both express an evolutionary continuum which depends upon highly questionable assumptions about the nature of modernity, tradition and progress. The inevitability of the transition from tradition to modernity implicit in the continuum means that features of each end of the continuum are subject to a similar inevitability of change with reference to direction.
