Abstract
This paper addresses some of the challenges to mainstream research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) thrown up by “critical perspectives”, which encompass contributions from postmodern theory as well as recent developments in the range of specialties known as “critical studies”. Since these challenges influence substantial tracts of scholarly discourse about linguistic diversity as well as about social and political responses to this diversity, it is useful to take stock of the corresponding claims and assess their import for language policy and planning (LPP) as a field of inquiry. Based on this examination, I argue that unless one is willing to buy uncritically into the problematic epistemological tenets of critical perspectives, their usefulness remains limited and is confined to heuristic side effects. The latter concern, in the main, a deeper treatment of the tension between language politics and language policy.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Sociolinguistica: past, present and future
- Writing regime change: a research agenda
- Pasts, presents and futures: discourses of colonization and decolonization
- Metalinguistic activities as a focus of sociolinguistic research: Language Management Theory, its potential, and fields of application
- Deconstructivism, postmodernism and their offspring: disorders of our time
- Language biographies
- Progress in LPP: towards an assessment of challenges from critical perspectives
- Sociolinguistics in an increasingly technologized reality
- Language policy research directions embedded in the sociolinguistic enterprise
- Superdiversity and its explanatory limits
- Language and identity: past concerns, future directions
- Reconstructing multilingualism in the Habsburg state: lessons learnt and implications for historical sociolinguistics
- Language planning and language policies for sign languages: an emerging civil rights movement
- Rethinking some terminological and disciplinary boundaries in researching language maintenance and shift (in the context of migration and beyond)
- The macrosociolinguistics of language contact
- Beyond the binarism: locating past, present and future sociolinguistic research on ideologies of communication
- The pursuit of language standardization research as a mission for true sociolinguists
- Spatial representation and sociolinguistic synergies
- Reviews
- Josephson, Olle (2018): Språkpolitik [Language policy]. Stockholm: Morfem. 320 p.
- Chalier, Marc (2021): Les normes de prononciation du français : une étude perceptive panfrancophone (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 454). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. 544 p.
- Spolsky, Bernard (2021): Rethinking Language Policy. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 276 p.
- Borbély, Anna (ed. 2020): Nemzetiségi nyelvi tájkép Magyarországon (Linguistic Landscape of Nationalities in Hungary). Budapest: Nyelvtudományi Intézet, 262 p.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Sociolinguistica: past, present and future
- Writing regime change: a research agenda
- Pasts, presents and futures: discourses of colonization and decolonization
- Metalinguistic activities as a focus of sociolinguistic research: Language Management Theory, its potential, and fields of application
- Deconstructivism, postmodernism and their offspring: disorders of our time
- Language biographies
- Progress in LPP: towards an assessment of challenges from critical perspectives
- Sociolinguistics in an increasingly technologized reality
- Language policy research directions embedded in the sociolinguistic enterprise
- Superdiversity and its explanatory limits
- Language and identity: past concerns, future directions
- Reconstructing multilingualism in the Habsburg state: lessons learnt and implications for historical sociolinguistics
- Language planning and language policies for sign languages: an emerging civil rights movement
- Rethinking some terminological and disciplinary boundaries in researching language maintenance and shift (in the context of migration and beyond)
- The macrosociolinguistics of language contact
- Beyond the binarism: locating past, present and future sociolinguistic research on ideologies of communication
- The pursuit of language standardization research as a mission for true sociolinguists
- Spatial representation and sociolinguistic synergies
- Reviews
- Josephson, Olle (2018): Språkpolitik [Language policy]. Stockholm: Morfem. 320 p.
- Chalier, Marc (2021): Les normes de prononciation du français : une étude perceptive panfrancophone (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 454). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. 544 p.
- Spolsky, Bernard (2021): Rethinking Language Policy. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 276 p.
- Borbély, Anna (ed. 2020): Nemzetiségi nyelvi tájkép Magyarországon (Linguistic Landscape of Nationalities in Hungary). Budapest: Nyelvtudományi Intézet, 262 p.