ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some background to the ways in which language and politics may be related. The key question is not whether applied linguistics is political but about how it should be critical. Five different ways of thinking about language and power are discussed. The first two disavow a connection between language and politics. For some, it is possible to maintain a strong political position while disconnecting it from language, which is seen in cognitive and universal rather than social terms. The second disavowal of political approaches to language comes in the form of mainstream socio- and applied linguistics. The broad liberal democratic egalitarianism that is generally espoused from this view is not acknowledged for the political position that it is. So embedded has it become for many academic linguists that it goes unnoticed. A social justice approach to applied linguistics, by contrast, may be an appealing way of framing a critical project but in itself it is a vague and largely liberal idea that cannot provide an adequate theoretical or political grounding for critical applied linguistics. Neo-Marxist analyses of the social order, together with a focus on ideology, science, and emancipation, present a far more useful frame for analysis than the disjuncture between language and politics evident in other approaches, though assumptions about the priority of material relations and the operations of ideology present problems for applied linguistics. Finally, a situated practice perspective provides an account of the multifaceted diffusion of power through the social world.
