4 - Linguistic Varieties and Multilingual Section

Over half the world’s population is bilingual and many people are multilingual. They acquire a number of languages because they need them for different purposes in their everyday interactions. Kalala’s experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo-Zaire, described at the beginning of chapter 2 , illustrated this. One language was his ethnic or tribal language, another was the language of his education, another served as a useful language of wider communication in particular contexts, such as the market-place, or with outsiders or tourists. This chapter examines the labels and the criteria that sociolinguists use to distinguish between different varieties or codes in multilingual communities.