ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the political nature of English. It discusses a number of reasons that we might see English, or any other language, as political: its potential to communicate and construct political ideologies; its use in the exercise and negotiation of power; and its capacity to articulate normative conceptions of how our world should, or should not, be. The chapter also considers the fact that language is not only an instrument of ideology, power and normative argument, but the object of such phenomena too. The politics of English is every bit as much to do with the things that people say about the language as it is to do with the uses to which it is put.
