Progress in LPP: towards an assessment of challenges from critical perspectives

This paper addresses some of the challenges to mainstream research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) thrown up by “critical perspectives”, which encompass contributions from postmodern theory as well as recent developments in the range of specialties known as “critical studies”. Since these challenges influence substantial tracts of scholarly discourse about linguistic diversity as well as about social and political responses to this diversity, it is useful to take stock of the corresponding claims and assess their import for language policy and planning (LPP) as a field of inquiry. Based on this examination, I argue that unless one is willing to buy uncritically into the problematic epistemological tenets of critical perspectives, their usefulness remains limited and is confined to heuristic side effects. The latter concern, in the main, a deeper treatment of the tension between language politics and language policy.