Over the past few decades, most sociolinguists and lingistic anthropologists have contributed to discussions about the relationship between communicative practices and social identities by focusion on specific ethnic, national, gender, sexual, and class groups to make their points. Whereas researches would now agree that processes of identification are crucial to achieving the co-patterning of culture and language in social life, there remains significant disagreement over which analytic methods best characterize the subjective experiences of linguistic minorities without promoting essantialist views of language use and human agency. One solution has been to develop cross-cultural studies comparing the different temporal and spacial scales through which linguistic practices constitute social relations, and vice-versa. This essay explores the value of such comparative approches in studying the social identification of linguistic minorites, specifically those that share a practical or symbolic relationship with French.

The authors discussion centers on the review of three monographs recently written by sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologist Monica Hellerm, Louis-Jacques Dorais, and Alexandre Duchêne, who each adopt diffrent vantage points from within the interdisciplinary field of francophone studies to develop innovative frameworks for comparing multilingual societies and organizations where French plays a dominant role in instantiating colonial, post-colonial, and neoliberal politics and subjectivities. Whereas Duchêne (2008) and Heller (2011) associate their comparitive methodology with the development of a criticle sociohistorical analysis. Also, both Heller and and Dorais informally define linguistic minorities as users of languages without official or privileged status in state societies, whereas Duchêne fomally defines linguistic minorites as discursive products of contested international negociations over human rights.