ABSTRACT
Sociolinguistics has recently developed confidence in its ability to engage in ideological critique. Language ideology is a powerful new perspective in sociolinguistics, emerging mainly from linguistic anthropology but linked to the critical tradition in linguistics and discourse analysis. Ideologically focussed sociolinguistics has introduced uncertainty as well as insight, not least because ideological critique is intensely reflexive and sceptical about intellectual practice. It tends to be subversive of long-established perspectives, and this includes painting canonical sociolinguistics as potentially naïve or old-school. It locates ‘traditional’ sociolinguistics, appropriately enough, as a product of its structuralist and Modernist origins. Scepticism comes easy of course, and it is sometimes evident that critical sociolinguistics, for all its purgative potential, it overconfident in its own ideological awareness, and even superiority. All the same, the turn to ideology has exposed some important fault-lines in sociolinguistic theorising, not least around the traditional topic of language planning and its more recent connections to linguistic human rights.
