Od bilingvismu к diglosii
From bilingualism to diglossia

Summary/Abstract: Bilingualism, its historical development, great diversity of its scholarly directions, all presented in its functional overloading leading, a.o., to the detachment of the new notion - diglossia (J. Vergote). The correlation between bilingualism and diglossia and the question of their present mutual independence in the specialized literature (esp. - as for the tautolingual communicative situation - in Ch. A. Ferguson). The present author’s vision of both the said notions, their identification and interrelation within the whole extent of the linguistic communication. The decisive dividing line between bilingualism and diglossia is then following the boundary-line between heterolingual (i.e., bilingual) and tautolingual (i.e., monolingual) communication. In such a way, the notion o f bilingualism can be defined as the capability of a speaker/of the collective of speakers to communicate alternately with each other in two or more different independent languages that are cummunicatively isofunctional and can be mutually substituted. So, the communicated reality as a whole can be alternately expressed by two or more language structures. The notion of diglossia then is to be understood as the capability of a speaker/of the collective of speakers to communicate alternately with each other in two or more language structures that are communicatively heterofunctional and mutually complementary, such ones synchronically constituting together solely one communicative whole (unit).

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