Continuity and change in views of society in applied linguistics

This paper starts out by looking at a general shift in the humanities and social sciences, where it is the interface between modernity and post-/late-modernity rather than the encounter between tradition and modernity that is now becoming the dominant problematic. It outlines some of the signs of this shift in sociolinguistics, and then argues that this makes applied linguistics more intellectually mainstream than it has perhaps been in the past. Even so, there may be some enduring blind spots.