Sociolinguistics and some of its concepts:

a historian’s view

JOAN-LLUÍS MARFANY

Abstract

The author takes an outsider’s look at sociolinguistics and aims various criti-
cisms at it. He sees the discipline’s reluctance to let go of proper sociological
and historical questions while at the same time insisting on remaining strictly
a branch of linguistics as its first and foremost problem from which the rest
ultimately derive. More specifically, he criticizes the idealistic and ahistorical
use of such terms as “language” and “dialect” and the failure to see the use-
fulness of “patois”; the failure properly to define “bilingualism” and “diglos-
sia” and to see the fundamental distinction between them; and the unfortunate
confusion created around the idea of “code switching,” which inextricably
mixes together (i) sociologically significant language switching (typical of
situations of bilingualism), (ii) cases of diglossia, (iii) the would-be monolin-
gualism of as yet imperfectly assimilated immigrant or subject populations,
and (iv) a ragbag of banal individual examples too idiosyncratic to be socio-
logically meaningful.

Keywords: sociolinguistic theory; language; dialect; patois; diglossia.

1. Introduction

I am a historian, not a linguist. A few years ago I published a book on the his­
tory of the penetration of Spanish in Catalonia (Marfany 2001) or, more pre­
cisely, on how Catalonia became increasingly diglossic over time. By the latter
part of the nineteenth century, Catalan society had become a copybook case of
diglossia: Catalans without exception used Spanish for a whole set of functions
and Catalan for another, and the distinction between the two was neat, unam­
biguous, and absolute. Catalans wrote (and spoke from the chair, the rostrum,
or the pulpit) in Spanish and spoke in Catalan.

0165–2516/10/0206–0001 Int’l. J. Soc. Lang. 206 (2010), pp. 1–20

© Walter de Gruyter DOI 10.1515/IJSL.2010.046

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2 J.-L. Marfany

All the while, I operated with a commonsense idea of diglossia, which

seemed perfectly adequate. Defined as the linguistic behavior consisting in the
use of one or the other of two languages in strict accordance with function,
diglossia certainly fitted the Catalan case like a glove. All the same, it seemed
to me that, scholarship oblige, I should back this amateurish grasp of the notion
with something a little more solid, so I started doing some serious reading in
sociolinguistics. I soon came to regret it. The problem was not that my under­
standing of the Catalan case was thrown into disarray or that I felt it needed
substantial revision or even nuancing. Diglossia as I had understood it still
provided the neatest label for the picture emerging from the documentary evi­
dence. The problem was that the idea of diglossia turned, in front of my very
eyes, into a kind of conceptual tumor. A bibliography on this idea alone
(Fernández 1993) ran, for the first thirty years or so in the history of the disci­
pline, to nearly 3,000 items and, as another, almost contemporary, bibliograph­
ical review (Hudson 1992: 618) admitted in conclusion, still no agreement had
been reached on the basic question of a clear and precise definition. Abandon­
ing the idea of backing my text with a suitable array of sociolinguistic biblio­
graphical references, I made clear in my introduction what I understood by the
word “diglossia” and stuck to it throughout the book — and left it at that.
By this stage, however, I had done a substantial amount of reading and ac­
cumulated pages of notes, and I was unhappy at the idea of having done all that
work in vain. So, I began to put my thoughts on the subject in writing, which
inevitably led to further reading and eventually to a long article, which is now
part of a new book, published in Catalan and addressed to the Catalan general
public (Marfany 2008). But, presumptuous though this may sound, I thought
my misgivings might not be without interest to sociolinguists in general, inso­
far as these misgivings represent the difficulties experienced by a historian
when trying to use their concepts and theories in order to make sense of some
historical problems. At the almost certain risk of provoking their irritation or
even indignation, an outsider’s view such as this may help them to look at their
own endeavors from without and perhaps help them tell a bit of the wood from
some of the trees. To my nonspecialist eyes, for instance, the contributors to the
most recent issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language
devoted to the subject of diglossia (157 [2002]) appear entangled in an ex­
tremely esoteric debate while ignoring the fact that there are a couple of very
basic and, one would have thought, prior matters of definition waiting to be
settled. I feel I have almost a duty to say so and it is in that spirit that I have
summoned the courage to offer the following remarks to their consideration
and to that of anyone interested in language and its history. Let me add that I
do so without any feeling that I am writing from the superior standpoint of my
own discipline. I am only too aware that many of the things that make me
skeptical or unhappy about sociolinguistics should be making me even more so

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 Sociolinguistics: a historian’s view 3

about the ragbag that goes by the name of “social history,” for example. They
do, as it happens, but that is the subject for a different article.1

2. Sociolinguistics and the sociohistorical study of language

Let me begin, then, with the uncertainty surrounding the name itself. Why so­
ciolinguistics? Why not the sociology of language? It is something which some
sociolinguists also appear to feel uneasy about: Fishman (1970, 1972) no less
changed the title of his very much reprinted book from Sociolinguistics to The
Sociology of Language, while leaving the contents untouched, and this special­
ized journal he has been editing since 1974 is called the International Journal
of the Sociology of Language. Other sociolinguists, the majority, in fact, do
dismiss the matter as a red herring (for a recent example, see Boyer 2001: 16)
and, if pressed, wearily reply that we are talking about two different things. At
the root of the distinction lies the idea, best articulated by Labov (1972), that,
language being essentially social, linguistics is either sociolinguistics or it is
nothing at all. If I have understood it rightly, then, sociolinguistics would in
essence be an antistructural conception of linguistics centered on the idea of
variation. The sociological and historical study of language would be an en­
tirely different affair, not concerning sociolinguists, but belonging strictly to
the fields of sociology and history and operating with strictly sociological and
historical concepts and methods — and “sociology of language” and “history
of language” would be the aptest names for it. A most explicit statement of this
view can be found in López Morales (1989: 26 –27), but most sociolinguists
nowadays, it is my impression, would go along with that in principle.
This seems eminently reasonable to me, who, needless to say, would only
be professionally interested in the second of these two quite distinct sets of
disciplines. For it is plain to see that such a conception of sociolinguistics au­
tomatically subtracts from its field of endeavor a whole set of questions per­
taining to the relation between language and society, foremost among which
are those of the how and why of the birth and the death of languages. Socio­
linguistic variation may show how certain varieties of speech actually evolve
out of others, but the emergence of a language out of a group of varieties
is the historical result of a socioeconomic and political process, not of a
(socio)linguistic one. Likewise, (socio)linguistic analysis of the contact be­
tween two languages may show how one is transformed by the other, but a lan­
guage does not die because it gradually fades into another, but because people
stop speaking it, and (socio)linguistics cannot explain how and why that hap­
pens. Nor can sociolinguistics thus defined have anything to say about how and
why Catalonia became increasingly diglossic between 1600 and 1870 and de­
creasingly so thereafter, not even if we qualify it with the adjective “historical”

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4 J.-L. Marfany

— though sociolinguistics in the Labovian sense can have an historical dimen­

sion, and a very fruitful one, as instanced by the impressive reconstruction of
the history of the Parisian dialect by Lodge (2004). As long, then, as the dis­
tinction is clear and stuck to, there ought to be no problem: sociolinguistics and
the sociology of language, historical sociolinguistics and the social history of
language can happily go their own separate ways.
I do not mean to say by that, of course, that sociolinguists ought to stay away
from all matters relating to the sociology or the social history of language.
After all, but for a few relatively recent exceptions (De Certeau et al. 1975;
Burke and Porter 1987, 1991; Burke 1993; plus no more than a handful of ar­
ticles, including the old precedent of Lot 1931), historians have not shown a
great deal of interest in researching the history of language. What I mean is that
whoever approaches these matters must do so as a sociologist or a historian
and not as a linguist, not even a “socio” one. Nor is this any more a question of
semantics than any other “question of semantics.” At first sight one might be
inclined to dismiss the distinction made by Rona (1970: 200) between “linguis­
tic sociolinguistics” and “nonlinguistic sociolinguistics” as an awkward way of
making the same point I am trying to make. But when López Morales (1989:
175–81), having made the same point too, goes on to discuss the death of lan­
guages in terms of a process of erosion of one language by another, or when
Wolfram (2004: 767), having acknowledged that the “factors leading to lan­
guage death are non-linguistic rather than linguistic,” follows this up with a
linguistic account of language death, one cannot help thinking that sociolin­
guists are after all trying to claim nonlinguistic questions of language in s­ociety
as theirs by right as (socio)linguists. Such is also the case with Fasold (1984)
and Fasold (1990), the respectively and perplexingly entitled The Sociolinguis-
tics of Society and Sociolinguistics of Language (I dare not speculate on the
possible significance of the article’s omission in the second title). The old “Que
sais-je?” series includes a Sociologie du langage (Achard 1993) and a Socio-
linguistique (Calvet 2006), but, perplexingly again, it is much more the latter
than the former which deals with sociological matters, certainly of the kind that
would interest a historian. For all that Joshua Fishman appears to have de­
cidedly opted for the denomination “sociology of language,” he still keeps a
foot, to say the least, firmly planted in the territory of Labovian sociolinguis­
tics. In fact, the frequently resorted-to notions of “microsociolinguistics” and
“macrosociolinguistics,” like the more esoteric couple “correlational socio­
linguistics” and “interpretive sociolinguistics” (Berruto 2003: 25–27), respond
to this generalized attempt not just to lay claim to “nonlinguistic” questions
of language in society, but to claim them as linguistic after all. There are even
some, as it happens, who, like Calvet (2006: 87–109), go as far as actually
­stating just that. Others, like Chambers (1995: 10 –11), Trudgill (2000: 3– 4),
Berruto (2003: 23–25), or Tagliamonte (2006: 3– 4), to give just four examples,

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 Sociolinguistics: a historian’s view 5

are less blunt, but their position is basically the same: yes, sociolinguistics and
the sociology of language are two different things, but the distinction is really
a matter of emphasis rather than anything else, there is great overlap between
the two, . . . and the overlap insensibly spreads in the direction of the latter,
until only a small residue of “linguistically extrinsic” — and not particularly
interesting, it is implied — matters is left out of it.
But one cannot have one’s sociolinguistic cake and eat it, and the result of
such greed is conceptual confusion. For “sociolinguistics” does not really mean
the same in “linguistic sociolinguistics” as in “nonlinguistic sociolinguistics,”
but the sociolinguist, by adopting precisely such a perspective, is badly placed
to see this, that is to say to be fully conscious of the fact that the same word
can designate two very different realities according to whether it is used as a
(socio)linguistic or as a sociological/ historical term. Take the most basic and
obvious of such terms, that of language itself. Sociolinguists on the whole tend
to take it rather for granted. For all their criticisms of structural linguistics they
tend to slip as a matter of course into a structural conception of individual lan­
guages as determined by their internal, ideal, linguistic characteristics. Wolof
and Occitanian are just as much languages as French. Of course, sociolinguists
are not blind to the fundamental differences between them nor to the fact that
those differences are of a social and historical nature (though, it seems to me,
they are less aware of the latter). Their answer to this would be that they tend
to adopt a flexible, pragmatic approach to the question, fitting the term to the
particular reality in question. Which is fine, but in so doing they risk losing
sight of the fact that, from the sociologist’s and the historian’s point of view,
those differences are the only thing that matters. This is exactly what happens
to Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985: 188–193) in the act itself of warning
about the need to distinguish between “Four meanings of the term Language
X.” It is what happens to Calvet (1998: 57–58), too, when discussing his old
lady who is unaware that she speaks Occitanian and thinks she speaks patois.
From a strictly (socio)linguistic point of view, Calvet is undoubtedly right to
point out that what the lady and her neighbors speak is the one same language
and that this applies to the whole area some people call “Occitania.” But when
he goes on to analyze the situation in sociohistorical terms and sees in it simply
proof of the low status of Occitanian and of the consequent lack of linguistic
self-awareness on the part of its speakers, he badly misses the point. In those
terms, he is wrong and his old lady is right — by definition: if she does not
know she speaks Occitanian, then she does not speak Occitanian. In fact, what the
old lady knows and Calvet apparently does not, is that, when she speaks patois,
she speaks patois, not a language; when she wants to do that, she speaks French.
What is more, the historical record shows that no one has ever spoken Oc­
citanian, that there is not and there never has been a language called Occita­
nian. There have been and to a certain extent there still are, over a certain area

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6 J.-L. Marfany

of present-day France and adjacent territories, a variety of vernaculars in which

linguists detect a number of common traits ( phonological, morphological, etc.)
out of which they construct an abstract, ideal entity they call Occitanian and
which they classify as a “language.” But such a “language” has never had any
historical existence. Languages, real languages, those which exist or have ex­
isted in the real world, are not givens, but historical constructs, the product of
more or less protracted historical processes, that is to say, processes of a social
and not a linguistic nature. Processes not of decomposition, through variation,
of pre-existing languages and then convergence into new ones, as conventional
“historians of language” and modern sociolinguists would have us believe, but,
on the contrary, of primarily social homogenization of pre-existing vernacu­
lars. Contrary to the tale we have always been told, Latin never “broke up” into
various Romances (Italo-Romance, Gallo-Romance, Ibero-Romance, so many
figments of the linguist’s imagination) which then went on to evolve into our
modern languages. Some languages developed as such, i.e., became languages,
out of some variety or other of what we might call Latin patois or, to put it bet­
ter, congeries of closely related Latin patois developed, for social reasons, into
languages. Others, often very closely related to those “successful” ones, began
at some point in history to develop in the same direction (Provençal, for in­
stance), without ever coming to fruition as languages. Others simply remained
vernaculars and, when some language established itself over the same territory,
turned automatically into patois. To the sociologist and the historian, only the
former are languages and, to avoid confusion, only the former should be called
so, but that is not the main point. The main point is that the process that made
some Latin dialects evolve into Romance vernaculars is not the same kind of
process that turned some of those vernaculars into a language: whereas the
former is undoubtedly a (socio)linguistic process, the latter is a strictly socio­
historical, not a linguistic, one. Processes of convergence, of koineization, of
creolization, and suchlike create new linguistic varieties, but they do not create
languages.
The same goes for the concept “dialect.” Sociolinguists, for whom linguistic
variation is the most fundamental reality, very properly insist on the fluid and
unstable nature, both in space and in time, of dialects, on the absence of sharply
defined boundaries, and the mutual convergence, or sometimes divergence,
between spatially contiguous ones. To the sociologist and to the historian of
language, however, for whom linguistic variation in itself is of no great sig­
nificance, a dialect is a very precise, neatly delimited, and stable (at least as
stable as sublunar things can ever be) social, not linguistic, reality. Of course,
Haugen (1966) did already point out a long time ago that the term “dialect”
traditionally meant two very different things to linguists and to historians of
language: on the one hand, the regional (spoken) variety of an established lan­
guage; on the other, a frustrated language — a vernacular or group of related

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 Sociolinguistics: a historian’s view 7

vernaculars that never developed into a language, a patois. But what is of para­
mount importance to the sociologist and the historian of language is the dis­
tinction between the two in social terms. Thus, in his comparison between the
situations arising where Spanish and Portuguese face each other across the
Uruguay–Brazil border and where Catalan meets Spanish in the Iberian Penin­
sula, Trudgill (1986: 83–84) only just alludes in passing to what, to the soci­
ologist and to the historian of language, is the gist of the question. Even then,
his allusion that “speakers of dialects from the Catalan part of the continuum
are generally [ . . . ] regarded as speaking a language separate from Spanish/
Castilian” somewhat misses the point.2 That there is a dialectal continuum in
that particular area of contact is, on the (socio)linguistic level, an undeniable
fact. On the Western side of the political border between the now autonomous
regions of Catalonia and Aragon, however, what is essentially the same (Cata­
lan) dialect as spoken on the other side is known, to its own speakers, by the
derogatory term txapurriau, in other words “patois” ( patués being in fact the
name given to it further north). Accordingly, it is only (less and less) spoken in
a very limited range of circumstances, outside of which people prefer to use
what they consider to be their language, that is to say Spanish. East of the bor­
der, the same speech, which is used in all circumstances, is regarded — and I
do not mean “generally,” but by its speakers themselves — not as a patois, but
as their language, Catalan — dialectal Catalan perhaps, but Catalan none the
less. And the real difference between this case and the situation arising at the
Uruguay–Brazil border is not to be looked for in the respective processes of
convergence or divergence, but in the fact that, in this case, it is on both sides
that speakers are in the position of thinking of themselves as speaking not a
patois, but a language. To put it, as does Woolhiser (2005: 262) in relation with
a very similar case on the border between Poland and Belarus, as “the fact that
the border delineates the geographical limits of two distinct sociolinguistic
hierarchies and their associated linguistic ideologies” seems unnecessarily
convoluted and opaque, but I think he means what I have just written. To at­
tribute it to the heterogeneity or homogeneity between the dialect and its “roof
language,” as Chambers and Trudgill (1980: 25–29) would, I imagine, have us
do, thus introducing yet another layer of unnecessary terminological com­
plication, might be an attempt at bringing the issue within the purview of
(s­ocio)linguistics, but it would be no explanation at all. The only possible ex­
planation lies in the way those “sociolinguistic hierarchies” have come about
and those “linguistic ideologies” have developed, and that is a historical, not a
sociolinguistic, question.
Let me insist, using now a historical example, the case of Venetian. Venetian
is not unlike Provençal: the homogenized form of a group of related v­ernaculars
which, toward the end of the Middle Ages, came very close to becoming a lan­
guage, but never did (Ferguson 2007). We all know the story: it was a similar

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8 J.-L. Marfany

form, a regional vernacular koinè, that of Tuscany, that eventually developed

into Italian. In so doing, it at first sidelined Venetian, then eventually embraced
it in a subordinate position as one of its dialects. Linguistically speaking, this
is, of course, a fallacy: there is no direct genetic relationship between modern
Italian and Venetian — they are rather like Homo sapiens and the chimpanzee.
Yet it is also a social and historical fact. When, some years ago, the Italian par­
liament passed a law for the protection of the rights of linguistic minorities, it
included under its provisions Catalan, French, Albanian, and a few others, all of
which are, in Italy, in effect patois. The law, however, did not include Ligurian
nor Sicilian nor Venetian, etc.,3 for the very simple reason that they do not need
protection, since, in the legislators’ view, they are all Italian — dialectal Italian,
but still Italian. (This, as we shall soon see, is in fact not true, but we can ignore
it for the time being.) To the sociologist and the historian of language the dis­
tinction between dialect and patois is thus extremely important. The Cockney
speaks English, even as he speaks Cockney; when he speaks Maraîchin, the old
peasant from the Vendée who still speaks it does not speak French.
Patois, of course, is a term sociolinguists in general shun: it seems no doubt
too loaded with prejudice and runs counter to the idea that one linguistic v­ariety
is just as good as any other. Trudgill (2000: 197), for instance, mentions it only
once, in the phrase “traditional dialects or patois,” and does not include it in the
index. Yet his statement (2007: 144) that “Provençal and Low German [ . . . ]
were formerly autonomous languages, but are now generally regarded as dia­
lects of French and German respectively” would have been much more accu­
rate, as an expression of the sociohistorical reality, had he written, dropping the
“generally regarded,” “are now French and German patois respectively.” Sim­
ilarly, all that the combination of the concepts of Ausbau and (two types of )
Abstand languages with those of autonomy and heteronomy can do for Trudg­
ill (2002: 111–124) is provide a very formalized classification of “minority”
languages, at the cost of introducing unnecessary complication and yet more
opaque terminology. This time patois is not mentioned at all, yet it would have
allowed a simpler and more effective formulation of essentially the same argu­
ment, but with an added explanatory element. And also, it must be added, a
more accurate one, for, to give just an instance, the statement “[Dutch in France
is] not Dutch, it’s Flemish,” far from being a misconception, is absolutely cor­
rect. Dutch is only Dutch in the Netherlands; in Belgium, where it is nowadays
also a language, it is no longer Dutch, but Flemish; over the German border,
and insofar as it is still alive, it is Plattdeutsch, a patois, which it is also, with
very much the same proviso, as Flemish again, in France. Looking at certain
things (socio)linguistically, I must insist, not only does not take us very far, but
it can obscure the issue.
Recourse to the extremely useful concept of patois would also help to clarify
the question which so exercises Italian sociolinguists and dialectologists, for

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 Sociolinguistics: a historian’s view 9

instance Muljačič (1997), Berruto (2001: 169–72), Loporcaro (2009: 61–70),

of “Italian dialects” versus “dialectal Italian.” What are usually called “dia­
lects” are in fact the old regional vernaculars which, like Venetian, as I pointed
out earlier, were turned into patois by the rise of Tuscan as the language of the
elites throughout the peninsula and more definitively by the emergence of stan­
dardized Italian after the unification. Between those patois, all in various stages
of terminal decay (and deserving the same kind of protection as those other
patois assimilated to non-Italian “proper” languages), and Italian, there has
developed since the unification, and much more decisively since 1945, a layer
of true regional dialects, the usually called “dialectal Italian(s).” In their mis­
trust of “patois,” sociolinguists are too preoccupied with the issue of prestige,
which is of very little significance and which, in any case, if the term is to be
retained, need not be regarded as so subjective and difficult to evaluate as it is
generally held to be. It can, in fact, be reduced to a very objective, measurable
notion. Contrary to the widespread idea, patois speakers are not particularly
ashamed of their speech, of which, in fact, they tend to be rather fond, at least
while it is reasonably alive. What they are is lucidly aware of the things they
can and, even more so, they cannot do with it. And very particularly of one
which is out of the question: as one of his informants told Carton (1981), “il ne
s’écrit pas” — it is not written.
This fact is perhaps obscured by sociolinguistics’ frequent blindness to the
glaring ambiguity surrounding its use of the verb “to speak.” It is never, or only
very rarely, clear whether it is used in the sense of “to have a language” or in
that of “to make an oral utterance” — and when the meaning is clear it invari­
ably is the latter. Sociolinguistics shares with the linguistics of the twentieth
(and now of the twenty-first) century, as the anthropologist Goody (1987: 258)
has pointed out, a surprising lack of interest in the written language — though
to be fair this seems to be changing lately. Yet without bringing the written
language into the picture, we are bound to get wrong both the sociology and
the history of any language. For one thing, without writing there is no language
(though becoming written does not automatically transform a speech variety
into a language). And in fact, the fundamental difference between a dialect and
a patois can be expressed in the following terms: a dialect does not have a
w­ritten form because it does not need one — its written form is the (written)
language. The Cockney speaks Cockney (i.e., dialectal English), but writes in
(standard) English. A patois does not have a written form because it cannot
have one. Its speakers do not write in it because it cannot and must not be writ­
ten. (When it does get written, as it occasionally does, it is within a very limited
set of special circumstances, in what amounts in effect to a transcription of oral
utterances.)
This should bring us nicely round to the next section, but before going into
that I would like to make one final point about the usefulness of the patois

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10 J.-L. Marfany

concept: it is essential to an understanding of the phenomenon of language

death. Languages, in fact, never die; only patois do. Languages must decline to
the level of a patois before they can die, but vernaculars too, native speeches in
colonial and ex-colonial societies, as well as pidgins and creoles thrown up by
capitalism in its devastating transformation of the whole planet, must become
patois before they face their demise; that is, they must find themselves locked
in a close, inescapable diglossic relationship with a language. But why, asks for
instance Hadjadj (1981: 71), do patois die? They die, is the very simple answer,
precisely because they are patois in a modern capitalist world in which patois
are excluded, as they always were, from a whole range of social activities from
which their speakers are no longer automatically and absolutely excluded
themselves — which is the reason why, to the great surprise of sociolinguists
like Hadjadj himself (1981: 87), Tabouret-Keller and Luckel (1981: 55–56), or
Maurand (1981: 104), it is patois-speaking mothers who, at some point, begin
to speak to their children in the relevant language in the home: they want the
best for them, as soon as that becomes a possibility. Patois begin to die the very
minute their speakers are no longer condemned to speaking them. An elabo­
rate, methodologically sophisticated sociological inquest like Hadjadj’s, facto­
rial analysis included, does highlight, with the necessary scientific guarantees,
the significant features and trends of such a situation, but we still need h­istorical
awareness to transcend the descriptive level and make sense of it.

3. Diglossia and bilingualism

We thus come now to the question that most directly affected me: diglossia.
The “focus article” in the already-mentioned issue of the International Journal
of the Sociology of Language devoted to the subject began with the admission
that, although the “3,000 or so entries in Mauro Fernández’s bibliography
[ . . . ] might well lead one to the conclusion that everything that needed to be
said [on diglossia] had already been said,” the truth was that sociolinguists
were as far away as they had ever been from agreeing on “a theory of d­iglossia”
(Hudson 2002: 1). I am not sure that would be something we would need to
worry too much about, but, unfortunately, it is on a definition of diglossia that
sociolinguists still cannot agree.
As I see it, Ferguson’s (1959) original definition would have been perfect
had he not restricted it to the use of one or the other of two distinct varieties of
the same language. He was right, in my view, in not wanting to apply the con­
cept to the relationship between any language and its dialects, which would
dilute it to the point of uselessness. Sociologically and historically, there is a
clear and fundamental distinction between the Cockney who writes in English
because to him Cockney (if he recognizes it as such) is simply the way he

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 Sociolinguistics: a historian’s view 11

speaks English and the Catalan who wrote in Spanish because Spanish, not
Catalan, was the language of writing. But, as my own example suggests, Fer­
guson should have contemplated the possible application of the term to the
relationship between two unrelated varieties of speech, i.e., two languages or
one language and an unrelated (or not-directly related) patois. Worse still, he
also went on to add to his sufficient and succinctly precise definition a whole
series of unnecessary additions which lay the concept open to objection on the
grounds of its not quite fitting some specific case or another and which conse­
quently led to a whole series of instances of the classical operation of throwing
the baby out with the bath water. (This is particularly the case with sociolin­
guists directly concerned with Catalan, Occitanian, and Swiss German, who,
almost to a man or woman, either reject the concept altogether or deny that it
properly fits their particular subject [see, for a summary, Boyer 2001: 50 – 62],
for reasons that are entirely ideological.) Then the inevitable followed: along
came Fishman (1967) who, on the strength of those objections, proceeded to
complicate the whole issue beyond redemption. Though he has been criticized
from the very beginning, sometimes most severely, as by Timm (1981), Fish­
man’s model has been the basic frame of reference of, and been reproduced
almost verbatim by, practically everyone dealing with the question, with the
exception of a minority who have remained staunchly loyal to Ferguson’s re­
stricted conception. And even a Fergusonian like Britto (1986: 27– 49), who
provides probably the most complete catalogue of Fishman critiques up to that
date, believes his contribution to have had a positive effect on balance. It must
also be said that, though duly covered in all general books on sociolinguistics,
the concept has never had much success as an analytical tool. Understandable
as this is, the concept, in my historian’s experience, is absolutely crucial and it
must be released from the horrible entanglement in which Fishman’s model
has landed it.
The real problem with the Fishmanian idea of diglossia, the one from which
all the others derive, lies in his misunderstanding of what constitutes the social
nature of the phenomenon. The problem lies in his distinction between bilin­
gualism as a “psycholinguistic” concept and diglossia as a “sociological” con­
cept. Psycholinguists have every right to claim bilingualism as their own if
they so wish and are welcome to do with it as they see fit. But bilingualism is
as much of a social phenomenon as diglossia and therefore as much of a socio­
logical concept, too. By the same token, diglossia can only be rationally d­efined
as a form of individual linguistic behavior, just like bilingualism. Unlike Mrs.
Thatcher and friends, I do believe that there is such a thing as society. I know
there are even such things as collective social phenomena. Speaking, however,
whether in the broad or the narrow sense of the word, is most emphatically not
one of them. With that in mind, we might most productively regard b­ilingualism
as having two meanings, a general one and a restricted one. The general one,

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12 J.-L. Marfany

of which both bilingualism in the restricted sense and diglossia are specific
forms, is an individual’s habitual use of two languages. Bilingualism in the
restricted sense is the linguistic behavior whereby an individual uses one or the
other of two languages depending on strictly personal circumstances and there­
fore in a totally unpredictable way. Diglossia is the linguistic behavior whereby
an individual uses one or the other of two languages according to function in
obedience to rules accepted by the whole of the social group to which he be­
longs and therefore in a totally predictable way. The two concepts are neatly,
beautifully I would even say, complementary: the bilingual person uses one
language or the other (more often, in fact, a language and a patois) depending
on whom he is addressing in all circumstances and for all functions; the diglos­
sic uses one language or the other depending on the function no matter whom
he is addressing.
This means, of course, that both concepts can only be applied to social
groups or whole societies as the expression of aggregate individual behavior:
such groups will be bilingual or diglossic according to whether their members
or a significant number of them behave bilingually or diglossically. Any other
use of the terms, and very particularly that of referring to national states as bi­
lingual or plurilingual simply because more than one language is spoken within
their confines, is inane and obfuscating — see for example Romaine (1995:
25–30), not to mention Calvet (1998: 31– 40). To say that Switzerland is a
quadrilingual country or that Brussels is a bilingual city is at best a trivial state­
ment hardly worth making, at worst an entirely misleading one. Hardly any­
body in Switzerland is quadrilingual. What we find in Switzerland is (Schläp­
fer 1985), unequally distributed over the territory and varying hugely in size,
two monolingual populations (French and Italian) and two (or rather two sets
of ) diglossic ones (Italic patois/German, in some valleys of the putatively
I­talian region, and Romansh patois/German), plus another population, the
G­erman-speaking one, which it is probably best to regard as diglossic, too,
given the strength of the conviction that Schweizerdeutsch, not used in writing
but always spoken, is a distinct language in its own right. Similarly, the popula­
tion of Brussels is made up of French monolinguals and Flemish bilinguals
who used to be diglossic in a not all that distant past. Let me insist, then: in
“macrosociolinguistic” terms, as sociolinguists like to say, only populations,
groups of individuals, can be bilingual or (never “and,” by definition rather
than for the reason given by, for instance, Berruto 2003: 195–196) diglossic;
never, ever, territories, cities, or states.
There is another important point to be made regarding diglossia as I have
defined it. What about Ancien-Régime societies, where the vast majority of the
population was monolingual while an important minority habitually used two
languages? How are we to describe them? Well, if we want to be pedantic, as
largely monolingual societies with a diglossic upper class. But in fact one

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 Sociolinguistics: a historian’s view 13

would be perfectly justified in describing such a society as diglossic, for it is

obvious that, as far as the question is concerned, only the literate class can be
taken into account. A society is diglossic — and this is the simple answer to the
question that seems to nag some linguists, Berruto (2003: 194–195) among
them — when those of its members in a position to be diglossic are diglossic.
This is not playing with words: the point is that being monolingual, in most
cases and certainly where the lower classes of Ancien-Régime societies were
concerned, is not a choice, which means that at the very least we cannot make
inferences as to the possible behavior of the lower classes, had they had a
choice — and in fact we know with hindsight what that behavior invariably has
been. Nor has a movement for the reversal of a diglossic situation (that is to
say, toward bilingualism in the restricted sense) ever sprung from the ranks of
the lower classes. It follows also from what I have just said that an upper class
that uses the language or patois of the lower class only to address the latter and
its own language within itself for all purposes and in all situations is not diglos­
sic, nor is the corresponding society — except of course for the fact that such
a society will inevitably throw up, from within the lower class, an upwardly
mobile literate stratum which will be diglossic for as long as it takes it to make
it into the upper class.

4. Code switching

It is also by reference to the complementary pairing of diglossia and bilingual­

ism as I have defined them that it is most rewarding, in my view, to look at yet
another highly problematic sociolinguistic concept: code switching. The study
of this particular phenomenon, as Berruto (1997: 394) again remarks and as
everyone will agree, has become by now a true growth industry within the field
of sociolinguistics, with the predictable consequences of any such rapidly
growing specialism, as fully illustrated by, among many others, Auer (1984)
and Myers-Scotton (1993c) or collections such as Heller (1988) or Auer (1998):
unstoppable generation of increasingly esoteric subtopics and debates within
debates, uncontrolled proliferation of technical vocabulary, corresponding in­
creasing opacity, and equally increasing self-referentiality. Sociolinguists per­
form great deeds of subtle interpretation to reveal hidden depths of meaning
and complex “discourse strategies” behind ostensibly banal acts of language
switching in the middle of a conversation or even, quite often, of a sentence
(intersentential and intrasentential code switching, in the jargon). From the
point of view of the sociologist or the historian of language, however, such acts
fall into one or another of three sharply defined categories, outside of which
they are, to quote a sociolinguist (Berruto [1997: 396] yet again), “depending
on hardly any recognizable constraint,” or in other words, simply meaningless.

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14 J.-L. Marfany

Take the much-quoted example from that classic of the genre, Gumperz
(1982: 30 –37), the one in which a black student in an American college, after an
exchange with a white lecturer in perfectly standard American English, turns to
his friends and says, affecting a ghetto accent and intonation: “Ahma git me a
gig!”. To say, with Gumperz himself (1982: 32), that this particular case of
“code switching” lends itself to “a multiplicity of interpretations” would be a
gross understatement: it is in fact liable to any number of interpretations, and
that is precisely what is wrong with it. Gumperz, and — whether in his footsteps
or not, I do not know — others, e.g., Myers-Scotton (1983) or Woolard (1995),
have devised, or perhaps borrowed from anthropology, a way of circumventing
the problem which seems to have become an important tool of the trade. Instead
of directly interpreting the raw material of the spoken exchange themselves,
they present it to “a panel of listeners,” “subjects,” or “consultants,” and ask
them for their comments. I am not sure that anything is really achieved by ask­
ing other people to speculate on something rather than do one’s own speculat­
ing, but insofar as there is some kind of outcome it can only be a self-fulfilling
one: the interpretations offered will be those expected from the various types of
people chosen to be on the panels, in accordance with the criteria for selection.
Of course, such speculation may sometimes be rather plausible: it is reason­
able to conclude, for instance, that the Kenyan worker in Myers-Scotton (1993a:
477) who, in rebuffing the farmer asking him for money, repeats his rebuttal in
Swahili and English as well as in the shared native vernacular, is trying, among
other things, to put distance between himself and his interlocutor. It remains
speculation none the less. Repeated, systematic observation of similar cases,
even prepared experiments, can perhaps yield meaningful results for those,
such as the anthropologist or the psychologist, who may be interested in look­
ing at oral exchanges in terms of “discourse strategies” dictated by the “nego­
tiation of identities.”4 For the social study of language such endeavors are, it
seems to me, not only irrelevant, but positively damaging in that they lead it up
the garden path.
There are also times, however, when the reason for the switch in conversa­
tion from one language to another is clear beyond doubt and when we can also
discern a true “choice” in the switch. Such is the case of the exchange also in
Myers-Scotton (1993a: 484) in the course of which a Luo trying to cadge a
favor from a fellow-Luo post-office clerk in Nairobi switches, as the last re­
source, from Swahili to Luo. I am not sure how worthwhile the analysis of such
a case is in terms of “discourse strategy,” but what I do know is that, in terms
of the social study of language, the relevant datum in this instance is not the
switch to Luo, but the fact that non-personally acquainted Luo speakers should
address one another, in the first instance, in Swahili rather than in the shared
native vernacular, in spite of the immediate mutual identification as Luos. We
are here in one of the three categorizable types I mentioned earlier. This type

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 Sociolinguistics: a historian’s view 15

can be illustrated, too, by the example in Fishman (1972: 29–33), in which a

Puerto-Rican businessman dictates a letter to his secretary in English, switches
to Spanish for some trivial chat, then goes back to English to finish the letter
and to give her some instructions about it. These are cases of diglossia as plain
as one is ever likely to see: English for the dictation (spilling over the fringes
of the particular operation into the professional relationship in general), Span­
ish for conversation; Luo for everyday chat with Luo friends and family, Swa­
hili for minimally formal exchanges with fellow Luos one does not know. I
suspect not a few of the cases analyzed in code-switching studies are of this
same kind. At any rate, anyone studying the switching of languages in conver­
sation for its possible social significance ought to ask themselves always
whether the case in point might not be one of diglossia, before going on to look
for other explanations.
Diglossia also often lurks behind cases of language switching, or more
e­xactly mixing, belonging to the second of my three categories. This is one
historians of language are very familiar with, in written form of course. Brun
(1923) came up with lots of examples from French municipal and notarial ar­
chives, when researching the penetration of French into the “Occitanian” lands.
I have seen it myself time and again in Catalan family archives in the shape of
artisans’ bills and invoices (Marfany 2001: 417– 428). Sociolinguists working
with Hispanics in American cities produce abundant oral examples (e.g., Fish­
man et al. 1971 or Poplack 1980), but the case is still the same. What happens
here is that the speaker (in the broader sense of the word), who wants to speak
in one of the two languages, starts to do so and carries on until limited mastery
of it fails him/ her, forcing him/ her to default to the other language, then goes
back to the original one until the next difficulty arises, and so on. This is not
even diglossia or indeed code switching: these people are trying their utmost to
behave monolingually; they just cannot quite manage it — and Gumperz
(1982: 62) himself acknowledges their frequent conviction that they are speak­
ing in just one language. Sociolinguists detect, or think they detect, all sorts of
emotional over- or undertones, of cultural meanings, of psychological strate­
gies, in the use of now one language, now the other. And some of those things
are very probably there (though I am not so sure about strategies and choices if
“strategy” and “choice” are to mean anything at all), but (a) because of their
strictly personal nature all one can do is, again, speculate about them and (b),
as far as they are socially significant, we have no means of telling whether the
significance does not simply attach directly to the languages themselves (one
is the language of the home, of one’s parents’ land, of one’s childhood, etc., the
other the language of work, of social advancement, of school, of society at
large, etc.) rather than to their changing use in the specific instance. Whether,
in other words, we might not be finding exactly what we had decided we would
find, as Romaine (1995: 175) also wonders might not be the case.

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16 J.-L. Marfany

As far as the sociology and the history of language are concerned, what we
have here are situations along a sliding scale that goes from the language one
does not yet sufficiently master to the language one no longer sufficiently
knows. They are typical of the transitional stages in the linguistic assimilation
of immigrant or of politically subjected or absorbed populations. As such, one
of the reasons why code-switching studies fail to recognize them for what they
are is the deep-seated ahistorical bent of the specialism, as of sociolinguistics
in general, and the consequent inability, acknowledged too, in passing, by Ro­
maine (1995: 176), to see the cases subjected to analysis precisely as stages in
a developing process. It is this inability which explains the inordinate attention
paid to, and the misguidedly elaborate interpretations of, phenomena such as
the so-called parler “melandjao” of certain Spanish immigrant communities
in France (Lagarde 1996), speech varieties bound to disappear in the not very
long term — over one generation, in fact — as surely as the sun is going to set
down this evening. Gumperz (1982: 64) has tried to deny this essential transi­
toriness of many of the cases students of code switching work so hard at de­
crypting with the fallacious argument that there are always people somewhere
doing exactly the same sort of thing. Perhaps, but we are then talking about a
new, different set of people engaged in another, new process, no matter how
similar, destined to run the same swift course to oblivion.5
Not all cases of language switching or mixing by default, however, are of
this kind. Some, as I hinted at before, are related to diglossia, in the sense that
it is at the root of the speaker’s limited competence which causes the switch.
Thus, in my childhood and adolescence in diglossic Catalonia, in Franco’s
time, when Spanish was the only language of education, whenever the conver­
sation with my school friends turned to learning-related matters (if we dis­
cussed, say, the math problem or the parsing exercise we had been set for
homework) our Catalan kept lapsing into Spanish. It is the same type of
d­iglossia-related difficulty which explains many of the instances analyzed by
Gardner-Chloros (1991) as well as those in Bentahila and Davies (1992), the
differences observed by the latter between the two age groups under study
b­eing attributable to the fact that the effects of the diglossia were only residual,
though still present, in the younger subjects, brought up in a post-Protectorate
society. Similarly, the rapidly diminishing frequency of code switching in
Brussels detected by Treffers-Daller (1992) is essentially the result of the re­
jection of diglossia by Flemish speakers (the only bilinguals and therefore the
only ones ever in a position to switch codes). This very simple reality tends to
be obscured by a misleading concentration on the idea of limited competence,
which is not really the problem with the speakers in these cases, who are mostly
not just entirely competent, but even fluent in both languages. But such com­
petence is perfectly compatible with very specific, repeated glitches: there are
certain things one is not used to saying in one or the other language. One does

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 Sociolinguistics: a historian’s view 17

know how to say them or could easily work out how to do so, but it is much
easier to switch, without a thought. Unless, as a Flemish in Brussels, you are
determined to avoid it.
For the third type of code switching I can offer again a personal illustration:
the situation which very often arose at home, when I was a child, whenever,
say, my mother, her brother, and his wife were in conversation. My mother and
my uncle were the children of Spanish-speaking parents and Spanish was their
mother tongue and the only one they used between themselves, but, having
lived in Barcelona since the age of five or, in my uncle’s case, since birth, they
both spoke perfect Catalan and spoke it always, as a matter of course, with
Catalan speakers — such as my aunt, my uncle’s wife. Consequently, in their
conversations, she remained monolingual — in Catalan, of course. My mother
or my uncle, looking at each other, would start a sentence in Spanish, but then,
as their gaze might shift toward my aunt, so would their tongue, with the same
unconscious ease, slip from Spanish into Catalan, then back again to Spanish
as they moved their eyes toward their sibling — all this in the middle of a sen­
tence. This, by the way, was not something peculiar to my family, but it is
something that happens all the time, now as then, in Catalonia (see some ex­
amples, though certainly not their convoluted interpretations, in Nussbaum and
Tusón 1995). This, but really only this, is identifiable as a form of behavior for
which the term “language switching” seems an apt name: this really is chang­
ing from one language to another — not for any subtle psychological or an­
thropological reason that must be skillfully teased out by a practiced specialist,
nor in accordance with some recondite “discourse strategy,” nor because of an
insufficient mastery of one or the other language, but simply because in a bilin­
gual society individuals speak one language or the other depending on whom
they are addressing, for entirely personal and aleatory reasons, and always
stick to the same language with any given person. Just as the first of the three
categorizable types I have discussed boils down to diglossia, this last one is
bilingualism in action. Bentahila and Davies (1992: 444) sum up fairly accu­
rately, if somewhat in spite of themselves, how to tackle so-called code switch­
ing in terms of the social study of language when they write: “In particular, we
feel that more attention should be paid to potentially influential aspects of the
users of code-switching, which might include their degree of proficiency in
each of the languages, the extent to which and domains in which they use each
language, their attitudes towards their languages and towards mixing them,
and the functions each language tends to fulfill in their everyday life and dis­
course.” Take away the misplaced tentativeness, the residue of misleading jar­
gon (code switching is not something people use, but something they do), and
the unnecessary repetitions (extent and domains/functions, which I much pre­
fer), and you have the whole thing in a nutshell: people switch or mix lan­
guages because either they try to speak in a language they do not know well

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18 J.-L. Marfany

enough and keep lapsing into the one they know, or they are diglossic, or they
are bilingual. And that, it seems to me, is that.

University of Liverpool

Correspondence address: j.l.marfany@liv.ac.uk

Notes

1. This article started life as a valedictory talk, upon retirement, to my colleagues of the School
of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Liverpool, later repeated in a
somewhat changed form in front of an audience of mostly linguists at the University of Lan­
caster. This is an expanded and much amended version. I am grateful to Paul Kerswill, Florian
Coulmas, and an anonymous referee for their very useful comments. The usual disclaimers
apply.
2. The latter part of Trudgill’s sentence (“whereas the acceptance of Galician as a separate lan­
guage is much more controversial”) is ambiguous. The status of Galician as a separate lan­
guage is only questioned in relation to Portuguese, not in relation to Spanish. If, on the other
hand, what is meant is that, in reality, it is a patois — and there is a direct relationship between
that and the reluctance to be assimilated to Portuguese — then I could not agree more.
3. Under the general heading “Norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche,”
Law num. 482, of 15 December 1999, art. 2, subsection 1 recognizes 12 linguistic minorities:
Albanian, Catalan, Germanic, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, French-Provençal, Friulian,
Ladin, Occitan, and Sardinian.
4. I have nothing to say, of course, about the study of the linguistic aspects of code switching,
as surveyed for instance in Romaine (1995: 122–161) and exemplified by, for instance too,
Myers-Scotton (1993b).
5. Another, even more basic, problem posed by code-switching studies is that the exchanges they
analyze are very often extremely short snippets of conversation, insufficiently contextualized
and without enough background information, and authors usually launch themselves eagerly
into their interpretation without even asking, let alone answering, the many previous questions
that come rushing to the reader’s mind.

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