Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online) Affiliation University of Utrecht, The Netherlands E.M.M.lePichon@uu.nl SOLS VOL 6.1 2012 173–178 © 2012, EQUINOX PUBLISHING doi : 10.1558/sols.v6i1.173 Review Social justice through multilingual education. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Robert Phillipson, Ajit K. Mohanty and Minati Panda (eds) (2009) Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pp. vii + 389. ISBN-13 9781847691903 (hbk) ISBN-13 9781847691897 (pbk) Reviewed by Emmanuelle Le Pichon Vorstman As stated by Aikio-Puoskari, ‘[t]he world was a great deal smaller […] when one’s identity was interlaced with one’s first language […]’ (p. 241). Nowadays, most countries are dealing with the challenge of multilingualism. Despite efforts to impose multilingualism in certain specific environments, the tendency is quickly becoming to view this ‘challenge’ as a means of enforcing the ‘right languages’ onto people. Social justice through multilingual education is an attempt on the part of researchers worldwide to eradicate the spreading concept of ‘wrong languages’. In doing so, researchers hope to help ‘save the 50% of Indian tribal children’ that ‘never reach grade 5’ and to increase the number of successful children in schools, of which ‘only 20% […] survive the years of schooling to take the high school examination’. Applied linguists thus propose multilingual education as a potential answer to the problematic situation created by a globalizing world. In chapter 1 which by itself constitutes Part One (pp. 3–18) of the volume under survey, ‘Multilingual Education: A Bridge too Far?’, Mohanty offers a bird’s eye view on the current situation, drawing our attention to ‘an unrespon- sive system that devalues the language, culture, identities’ of minority language populations. He describes a schooling system that submerses the children only