Rethinking empowerment in Creole communities

This chapter is concerned with longstanding Applied Linguistics issues in Creole communities and how a broad language-ideological perspective can shed new insights on them. Given the touted importance of applied matters in research on Creole communities, the chapter first engages with debates on focal topics (e.g., standardisation, including the politics of orthography; integration of Creoles into education systems; development of educational material). It then explores more recent frameworks (linguistic human rights, linguistic citizenship, cultural citizenship) for understanding Applied Linguistics issues and how they could contribute to reconceptualising language-related matters in Creole communities from a more holistic perspective and develop comprehensive approaches to understanding and addressing them. We argue that to address longstanding issues, we need to pay much closer attention to the ideological forcefields and stances that issues and positions are currently indexically linked to, and how those fields have been changing over time, given their impact on “solutions” and discussions.