Originally published in a collection in 1987, this article provides a critical discussion of the notion of "linguistic community" in different approaches of language studies, from Generative Theory to Discourse Analysis, including Sociolinguistics and Literary Criticism. In a debate about the distance between the homogeneity of the imagined linguistic community (in Anderson's sense) and the fractured reality of linguistic experience in modern stratified societies, the text proposes a change in the approach to language studies and advocates the end of linguistic utopias, as well as the urgent recognition of a linguistics of contact.
linguistic community; imagined community; contact