ABSTRACT
The language ecology movement, and the linguistic human rights movement with which it is closely associated, have come under increasing criticism in recent years – both from within and without – for a number of key limitations (see, for example, Blommaert 2001; Brutt-Griffler 2002). The first is a tendency to present a ‘preservationist’ and ‘romanticist’ account of minority languages 2 and their loss. A second is to assume – in their less sophisticated manifestations, explicitly , and even in their most sophisticated forms, at least implicitly – an almost ineluctable connection between language and (ethnic) identity . In response, critics of language and ecology and linguistic human rights present two counter-claims. The first is what might best be described as ‘resigned language realism’ – that as much as we might not like the process of language shift and loss, there is little, if anything, we can do about it. Edwards (1984, 1985, 1994) perhaps best exemplifies this position. The second is a constructivist/postmodernist rejection of any intrinsic link, even any significant link, between language and identity; a position that, as we shall see, continues to be widely held within the sociology and anthropology of ethnicity and nationalism, as well as among a growing number of sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and critical applied linguists (Rampton 1995; Silverstein 1998; Heller 1999; Norton 2000; Pennycook 2001).
