Linguistic landscape refers to the visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in agiven territory or region. It is proposed that the linguistic landscape may serve important informational and symbolic functions as a marker of the relative power and status of the linguistic communities inhabiting the territory. Using the theoretical framework of ethnolinguistic vitality, it was hypothesized that the experience of the linguistic landscape by members of a language group may contribute to social psychological aspects of bilingual development. Factor analysis results show that the linguistic landscape emerges as a distinct factor separate from other measures of linguistic contacts. This factor was an important correlate of subjective ethnolinguistic vitality representing perceptions of the vitality of the in-group language in various domains. The study also found relations between the Linguistic Landscape factor and degree of in-group language use, especially in institutional settings, suggesting a 'carryover effect" of the linguistic landscape on language behavior.

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In this special issue it seems appropriate to contrast the ethnolinguistic vitality construct with another important construct, one that originated from a different theoretical perspective, but one that, like that of ethnolinguistic vitality, has made an important contribution to the sociology of language. In this paper, we discuss the contributions of the constructs of diglossia (Ferguson 1959; Fishman 1967) and ethnolinguistic vitality (Giles et al. 1977) to the understanding and prediction of language behavior in bilingual or multilingual contexts. The link between diglossia and ethnolinguistic vitality was first proposed by Bourhis (1979) äs a way of integrating various research traditions within macrosociolinguistic analyses of language behavior. In this article, the potential of these two theoretical constructs for explaining frequency of language use will be contrasted by using both conceptual frameworks to analyze language behavior data collected in several communities in seven Canadian provinces.Both diglossia and ethnolinguistic vitality are primarily concerned with the macrosocial aspects of language, äs they are more concerned with the social structure and processes related to language maintenance and language use than they are with a microlevel analysis of language behavior. Both constructs, however, have been extended and used for the study of the social psychological aspects of language behavior. It is this latter perspective that is of central interest in this paper.The paper is divided into four parts. The first analyzes the concept of diglossia and its relation to bilingual behavior. The second presents the concept of ethnolinguistic vitality and how it is being used for the understanding and prediction of language behavior in bilingual contexts. More precisely, it is shown how the construct of ethnolinguistic vitality has been incorporated into a model of the social and psychological determinants of language behavior (Landry 1982; Allard 1987, 1990). In the third part of the paper, data on the language behavior of anglophones and francophones from various parts of Canada will be

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