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Historical processes exert an influence on the current state and evolution of situations of language contact, brought to bear from different domains: the economic and the political, the ideological and group identities, geo-demographics, and the habits of inter-group use, among others. Clearly, this kind of phenomenon requires study from a complexical and holistic perspective in order to accommodate the variety of factors that belong to different levels and that interrelate with one another in the evolving dynamic of human languaging. The need in my view is for the restricted and general complexity approaches to come to a meeting of the minds, and take steps toward a mutual integration based on the acceptance of the shortcomings of each approach, achieving progress through a non-contradictory complementarity of perspectives. It must be conceded that the practical and methodological applications of basic complexical ideas need to be developed much farther in order to apply them to specific research. At the same time, the limits of complex adaptive systems as computational strategies must be accepted in the pursuit of a better understanding of the dynamic and evolutionary processes typical of human beings. New tools for the conception, apprehension and treatment of the data will need to be devised to complement existing ones and to enable us to make headway toward practices that better fit complexical perspectives. It seems obvious that human complexics must be seen as multi-methodological, insofar as necessary combining quantitative-computation methodologies and more qualitative methodologies aimed at understanding the historical mental and emotional world of people.

Contact between culturally distinct human groups in the contemporary 'glocal' -global and local- world is much greater than at any point in history. The challenge we face is the identification of the most convenient ways to organise the coexistence of different human language groups in order that we might promote their solidarity as members of the same culturally developed biological species. Processes of economic and political integration currently in motion are seeing increasing numbers of people seeking to become polyglots. Thus, English is establishing itself as the usual world supra-language, although it coexists with other lingua francas that are widely used in certain parts of the globe. All this communicative reorganization of the human species may very well pose new problems and aggravate existing tensions as regards language and identity. It would seem that these processes comprise at least four major conceptual dimensions which must be taken into account above all else, as they are both widespread and, left unaddressed, may lead to significant social instability. These dimensions concern linguistic recognition, communicability, sustainability and integration. While accepting the utility of having an inter-national language, the keystone of the system is clearly that it must ensure the linguistic sustainability of each group. The basic principle is likely to be functional subsidiarity, i.e., whatever can be done by the local language should not be done by another one which is more global. As in the quote from Paracelsus --"the dose alone makes the poison"-- contact between languages is not 'poisonous' per se, but when the correct dose is exceeded it can prove harmful to the language whose position is weaker. A multilingual and communicated humanity is possible.

The expansion in areas of human interrelation (mainly economic and technological), is giving rise to an important phenomenon of the bilingualization or functional polyglotization of many individuals. Political action and representations and discourses on language diversity are therefore primordial. One of the first aspects we need to study with world authorities is how to overcome, through discourse, the dichotomies that restrict us, and promote the search for new principles and ways of looking at situations of language contact. As regards the traditional criteria for the organisation of plurilingualism, for example, I believe that we may need to look beyond the principles of 'territoriality' and 'personality' for the more complex situations that so require. Despite their obvious advantages, both principles tend to presuppose that individuals are monolingual and cannot, in principle, resolve the problem of intercommunication. How then can principles such as these resolve the construction of a European sociocultural space in practice? How are we to understand each other, setting aside simple, formal institutions with multiple translation systems, if we all want to remain functionally monolingual? How would the application of a principle of 'personality' be possible for so many languages in such a widespace? We may well have to look elsewhere for the answer. I suggest, therefore, that the search focuses on the study of the application of the principle called 'subsidiarity' (already present in European nomenclature) in the field of linguistic communication. We could adapt this political and administrative principle into a language policy principle that, generally-speaking, establishes the criteria that "whatever a 'local' language can do, a 'global' language should not". That is to say, we would allow – and promote – the effective, mass knowledge of other languages, giving functional pre-eminence where possible to the language of each historically-constructed linguistic group. So-called'foreign' languages would be used for external contact (which would occur increasingly more often) but local, everyday functions would be clearly allocated to the own languages of each linguistic group. After years of thinking in terms of 'or', we now need to explore the linguistic organization of mankind in terms of 'and', i.e. from the point of view of complexity– without excluding either objective. We must ask ourselves about how precisely we canmake both possible: the maintenance and development of the various languages and, at the same time, the necessary intercommunication.

The ecological vision enables us to bring together elements which appear to be separate, while at the same time maintaining a degree of autonomy for each distinct part. So we can now leave behind us the image of linguistic codes as separate from the other components of reality, though this idea of separation has presided over most of the field of linguistics for many years. This perspective provides a much clearer understanding of language change and shift. Without any hesitation on theoretical grounds we can relate modifications of form to the decisions of speakers or to changes in their demolinguistic, sociological or economic contexts. The 'life and death' of languages – to be metaphorical again - are much better understood from an ecological perspective. The use or neglect of language varieties is the consequence of developments in other relevant sociopolitical aspects that comprise the sociocultural ecosystem as a whole: any change in ideologies, values, economic or political organization, waves of migration, technological innovations, which disrupt stability of the ecosystem are likely to lead to respective changes in the forms and codes of linguistic communication between humans. Languages, then, like biological species, never live in a vacuum; they are fully integrated and adapted to their sociocultural ecosystem and to the other elements inside it.

Si l'on compare les différentes situations de contact linguistique existantes dans lesquelles le facteur politique est le plus déterminant – à côté d'autres facteurs qui pourraient éventuellement aboutir au contact direct et fréquent entre les populations – on constate des évolutions qui, dans la plupart des cas, suivent des chemins parallèles; mais il en est un certain nombre qui attirent l'attention par des processus divergents. Comment se fait-il que, malgré des distances interlinguistiques considérables – cas du grec ou du suisse allemand – et une nette distribution complémentaire des variétés entre les fonctions « hautes » et les « basses », on n'abandonne pas, d'une génération à l'autre, les variétés « basses » au profit des « hautes »? N'est-ce pas ce qui se produit dans la plupart des cas de substitution linguistique? Le problème a donc à voir avec l'hypothèse, ou quasi-loi sociolinguistique, qui pose que l'évolution aboutit nécessairement à la substitution dans les sociétés dont les individus maîtrisent massivement deux codes et les emploient socialement en distribution fonctionnelle hiérarchisée. Et si cette situation était une condition nécessaire mais non suffisante pour expliquer l'évolution vers l'abandon intergénérationnel des variétés locales?

The socio-political evolution of western societies, that have corne to provide a model imitated by other non-western countries, has led, especially over the last two centuries, to an enormous increase in the functions and power of the state in the everyday life of the community. Language is one of the areas in which the state's influence has grown most quickly. Over and above the self-organizing and polycentric secular social dynamic used to solve problems of everyday linguistic communication, political authority has become, in many countries, the chief organizer of public language communication. In contemporary societies, then, the final choice of linguistic code or codes for institutionalized public life lies in the hands of political bodies. As a result, in general terms the language that the population must know is also decided by political bodies through universal and obligatory education. Political power will also decree -directly, or by delegating the task to academic institutions or linguistic authorities- the form of the code or codes to be used.

[ENG] We define as linguístic normalization - the descriptive term conceived by Lluís V. Aracil (1965) - those processes which certain linguistic communities, politically dominated over a long period of history, adopt in order to create the necessary conditions for ensuring in full their normality and stability as a human gro up with a distinct language of their own. This process generally entails the supplanting of the alien language, viz. that of the dominant national group, by a linguistic code of their own, derived from the autochtonous community itself, as the vehicle for serving all the internal functions which the other language had until then monopolized by reason of the political dependence of the subject community.