Critical thought in sociolinguistics in France

Abstract The critical dimension was a founding principle of sociolinguistics in France in the 1970s. In this article, I reflect upon the future of this critical thought, forty years on. After outlining the Bourdieusian conception of a critical discipline, I present the development of this thought within French sociolinguistics, dividing it into three stages: the emergence of critical sociolinguistics during the 1970s; the years of its decline (1990–2000); and the current situation, which is characterized by a great amount of scientific diversity. The last forty years have seen the gradual establishment of a scientific community based upon both a sharing of theoretical and methodological principles and upon scientific controversy, including that of the purpose of the discipline. Sociolinguistics in 2017 is faced with the dominance of formal linguistics, and with the intellectual dispersion of the field: what sociolinguistics can offer, in response to this, is its capacity for social implementation.