ABSTRACT
There are those who believe that all of sociolinguistics is ‘applied linguistics’. Because of our own agreement with Kurt Lewin’s dictum that ‘Nothing is as theoretically promising as a good application’, the above-mentioned belief does not worry us. Nevertheless, we do consider it to be a mistaken view, if only because it leaves out a necessarily corresponding recognition that any good application must be grounded in a good theory. Indeed, our major regret is that there is still relatively little sociolinguistics to apply1. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas is doubtlessly among the most outstanding ‘applied sociolinguists’ of our generation (see, e.g., her 1994 volume with Robert Phillipson). Her interest in fostering more mutually rewarding and stronger models of bilingual education and of defending the contextually weakest languages contributes tellingly to the foundations of theoretically informed language defense efforts.
