THE PROBLEM OF BILINGUALISM, DIGLOSSIA AND LANGUAGE CONTACT IN RUSSIAN AND FOREIGN LINGUISTICS

In the world of sociolinguistics in recent decades, there has been an increased interest in various aspects of language contacts and bilingualism, namely, determining the status of new socio-territorial varieties of languages used for communication by representatives of specific linguistic and cultural communities. Such variants are characterized by a set of extra–linguistic variables that correlate with linguistic facts — the speaker’s ethnic origin, religion, social status, gender, education, age, etc. The article discusses the main problems and characteristics of bilingualism, diglossia, and language contact in Russian and foreign linguistics. There is no uniformity in the interpretation of different types and synonymous concepts of bilingualism in modern scientific literature, including diglossia and its intra-linguistic variety. The paper aims to compare their fundamental features and differences, as well as to present diglossia as a special variant of bilingualism.