So far, we have been concerned mainly with the bilingual individual, from a number of different points of view and scientific disciplines: bilingual development (Chapters 3 to 5), neuropsychology (Chapter 6), information processing (Chapter 7), cultural and ethnolinguistic identity (Chapter 8), and intercultural communication (Chapter 9). At the points in the two preceding chapters when intergroup relations were mentioned, it was as an interpersonal process in which individuals interact with each other as members of different ethnolinguistic groups. In the present chapter we examine the role of language in intergroup relations at the societal level, when different languages and cultures are in contact.

This chapter differs from the earlier chapters in a number of respects. Having addressed the problems of the bilingual speaker as an individual and in his interpersonal relations, we now consider relations between ethnolinguistic groups. Thus we move from a micro- to a macro-level of analysis and to disciplines which are concerned with socio-structural factors, like, among others, sociology, sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Because these disciplines deal with a multiplicity of factors and multidimensional phenomena, it is difficult to control all these factors. As a result, theories are thin on the ground and what pass for models are often mere typologies and taxonomies which are more descriptive than predictive; their methodologies include the measures of societal bilingualism reviewed in Section 2.2.3. But social and cultural phenomena have also a psychological reality, and the intergroup and interpersonal levels are the only two poles of the social-interaction dimension.