ABSTRACT

Recent work 1 on the sociolinguistics of plurilingualism 2 has shown that it can be most illuminatingly and economically treated within the same conceptual framework as diglossia 3 and register 4 . These are all manifestations of language variety, and, more specifically, of what I prefer, with Gregory (1967), to call diatypic variety. ‘Diatypes’ are varieties of language within a community, specified according to use (purpose, function), whereas dialects are specified according to groups of users. Like so many of the lines drawn in the social sciences, such distinctions are fuzzy at the edges, but they are no less serviceable for that. It is important to remember that, in drawing them, one is distinguishing not so much between different bodies of material as between different ways of looking at the same material. People may, as Fishman (1967) has pointed out, be bilingual or bi-dialectical with or without participation in diatypic (diglossic) situations; moreover, the same utterance may best be described dialectically to meet one particular explanatory aim, diatypically to meet another.