ABSTRACT
The interplay between languages and media has long been socially relevant as well as a driving force of social change. A preliminary consideration of five phases of the history of this interplay highlights this relevance. In the initial phase, practices of coping with more than one language must have emerged as soon as different discourse communities came into contact with each other through oral communication. In a second phase, media of written communication contributed to the stratification of societies. Such societies were and continue to be based on the power of documented birthright, on written contracts as well as on exclusive access of elites to codified, written knowledge and high-prestige languages. The unequal distribution of written media and their related prestige languages as social resources was rigidly organized top-down.
