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date: 05 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Social justice has been at the core of sociolinguistics since its emergence as a field in the 1960s. Sociolinguists have taken strong stances in support of language diversity and have worked in solidarity with language-minoritized communities to counteract social inequalities. The early years of sociolinguistics, shaped by a positivist modernist approach, optimistically believed top-down multilingual language policies, alongside empirical research that documented the legitimacy of all language and language varieties, would be sufficient in effectively addressing social inequalities. Over the past fifty years, sociolinguists have come to realize the rooted nature of inequalities. This volume develops this understanding and builds on recent work on the complicity of sociolinguistics in reinforcing the inequalities it critiques and the emergence of critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics. This conclusion draws upon these lessons to develop general principles for the field.

Keywords: social justice, sociolinguistics, inequality, ideology, critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics, poststructuralism

Ofelia García

Ofelia García is presently the dean of the School of Education at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University. She has published extensively in the areas of bilingualism, bilingual education, sociology of language, and U.S. Spanish. She is the editor of the new journal Educators for Urban Minorities. She can be reached at http://ogarcia@gc.cuny.edu.

Nelson Flores

Nelson Flores is an Assistant Professor of Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. His research seeks to denaturalize dominant language ideologies that inform current conceptualizations of language education. This entails both historical analysis of the origins of current language ideologies and contemporary analysis examining how current language education policies and practices reproduce these language ideologies. His primary objective is to illustrate the ways that dominant language ideologies marginalize language-minoritized students and to develop alternative conceptualizations of language education that challenge their minoritization. His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Linguistics and Education, TESOL Quarterly, and Harvard Educational Review.

Massimiliano Spotti

Massimiliano Spotti is assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He is also deputy director of Babylon – Centre for the Study of Superdiversity at the same institution. His research tackles the theme of asylum seeking and identity construction through the analysis of social media influence on the doings of asylum seekers. He has published his work in several peer-reviewed journals including Linguistics and Education, Diversities, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, Applied Linguistics Review as well as co-editor of the Volume Language and Superdiversity (Routledge 2016).

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