ABSTRACT

UNTIL THE 1950s THE psychological literature on bilingualism was so much more extensive than its sociological counterpart that workers in the former field have often failed to establish contact with those in the latter. Since the 1960s a very respectable sociological (or sociologically oriented) literature has developed dealing with bilingual societies. It is the purpose of this chapter to relate these two research traditions to each other by tracing the interaction between their two major constructs: bilingualism (on the part of psychologists) and diglossia (on the part of sociologists).