ABSTRACT
Since the 1960s a very respectable sociological literature has developed dealing with bilingual societies. This chapter aims to relate these two research traditions to each other by tracing the interaction between their two major constructs: bilingualisin and diglossia. There are situations in which diglossia obtains whereas bilingualism is generally absent. Two or more speech communities are united religiously, politically or economically into a single functioning unit notwithstanding the socio-cultural cleavages that separate them. Many studies of bilingualism and intelligence or of bilingualism and school achievement have been conducted within the context of bilingualism without diglossia, often without sufficient understanding on the part of investigators that this was but one of several possible contexts for the study of bilingualism. Thus, bilingualism without diglossia tends to be transitional both in terms of the linguistic repertoires of speech communities as well as in terms of the speech varieties involved per se.
