Has there ever been a situation of perfect bilingualism, without falling in diglossia?
In many places around the world there are different languages that coexist: some people speak one, some the other, and many can speak both.
There are as many cases as situations: some of the languages are forbidden, others are official, while others have some good/bad background.
Over time, if a language is official and offers benefits to the speakers, it is difficult for the people speaking the other to keep it over generations, so it becomes a diglossia: one language is used for certain situations, while the other is used on the rest. Normally, one becomes the official and the other one becomes the popular.
However, I wonder: has there ever been, or even now, a situation of perfect bilingualism in a place, where the indicators of both languages remain more or less equal over the decades? This needs to imply that both languages are official and taught in schools, for example.
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The term "multiligualism" is generally used to characterize the linguistic capabilities of a single speaker. If the person uses exactly two (or at least two) languages, they are bilinguial even if no one else in the world is bilinguial.
The term "diglossia" is a socio-linguistic term, it is used to characterize the situation within a society.
If, for the sake of an argument, we assumed that every adult Swiss person is comfortable to use any of Standard Swiss German, French and English, while (perhaps) none of Italian, Romansh, Standard German, or Berndeutsch come anywhere close to that, we could certainly characterize the societal situation as based on universal multilingualism. This wouldn't, at least not conceptually, prevent the emergence of many examples of diglossia in segments of the multilingual society.
The problem with the purest "multilingualism without diglossia" is that the lack of compartmentalization reduces the incentives for inter-generational transfer of that many languages, so the sociolinguistic situation might not be particularly uniform geographically nor particularly stable over time.
In simpler terms: if at least one language is completely optional to learn within that particular social group, why even bother to learn it; and if no language is actually optional, that's already diglossia.
I'm sure that you'll find many exciting examples of bilingualism without diglossia, but the best ones will involve pretty small groups[1], be rather temporary[2], or be fueled by ongoing language contact or language shifts in adjacent populations.
Diglossia is thus more rewarding to generalize about at a societal level than mere multilingualism and thus currently attracting more of socio-linguistic research.
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