Diglossia

Download or read book Diglossia written by Mauro A. Fernández and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1993-11-11 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, the notion of 'diglossia' occupies a prominent place in sociolinguistic research. Since the 1960s, when the dominant sense of 'diglossia' was the complementary sociofunctional distribution of two varieties of the same language, the term has been applied — often controversially — to a growing number of diverse sociolinguistic situations. As a consequence of this extension of the scope of the concept, in combination with an increasing interest in the relationship between the role of language and the social structure, the number of publications in this field has risen exponentially over the last decades. However, despite the growing importance of the notion, up till now there was no adequate bibliography devoted to diglossia, while coverage in other bibliographies does not do justice to the number of works actually published in this area. This first comprehensive bibliography of the subject includes almost 3,000 entries; although the time span covered is 1960-1990, the book includes several dozens of entries from before 1960 and also a substantial number of very recent publications from the period 1990-1992. The selection of items has not been restricted to a specific definition of diglossia: all available publications in which the term (or one of its offsprings) appears have been included; moreover, when considered appropriate, some material relevant to the subject has been added even though the term is not explicitly used. The usefulness of the bibliography has been enhanced significantly by six indexes: (1) index of languages, (2) diglossia in literature, (3) historically oriented works, (4) pedagogically oriented works, (5) theoretical works, and (6) theses and dissertations.