What can linguistic justice researchers and practitioners learn from more than a century of social justice debates?

The concept of linguistic justice is increasingly understood by researchers and practitioners as being linked to, or part of, social justice. However, social justice itself is a contested concept that has changed definition over time, and which takes numerous, sometimes incommensurable, forms today. This article thus aims to support linguistic justice researchers and practitioners to understand and clarify how they conceptualize social justice. To do this, I provide a brief cross-disciplinary overview of major debates surrounding the concept of social justice, starting from the terms’ first appearance in the nineteenth century. In doing so I explore three significant forms of social justice from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries: reactionary justice, global justice, and decolonial justice. I then examine the implications that these different approaches have for how we theorize and pursue linguistic justice. In doing so, this article aims to provide bibliographic, terminological, and conceptual resources for anyone wishing to develop a more robust and transparent approach to linking social justice and linguistic justice in their work.