ABSTRACT
One of the first and most prominent experts in demolinguistic issues, John De Vries, explained in 1987 how the study of minority languages had developed since Uriel Weinreich published his well-known book Languages in Contact and Einar Haugen his guide on studies of bilingualism. Throughout all of them, underlying conceptual pitfalls and formal methodological difficulties have been identified, but even so, the authors have demonstrated the projection of demolinguistics into different spaces and levels of the sociolinguistic reality of many populations of the world. This is because demolinguistics allows for the description and analysis of minority languages of an ethnic nature, regional and immigrant minority languages, and local and social minority varieties, together with majority, national, and transnational languages. At the same time, demolinguistics ability to influence areas outside of research will depend to a large degree on the quality and accuracy of demolinguistic projections, which will be assessed according to their applicability.
