Is the COVID-19 Pandemic a Critical Juncture? Insight from the Study of “New” Multilingual Governance Techniques

Is the COVID-19 pandemic a critical juncture? An emerging social scientific scholarship on the COVID-19 pandemic has set out to study its effects on a range of social, political, and economic phenomena. Some of this scholarship theorizes that the COVID-19 pandemic is one of those rarest and most impactful moments in time, what historical institutionalists would call a “critical juncture”. This article tests a COVID-19 critical juncture hypothesis by conducting a theory-infirming case study of recent multilingual developments in the United States. Process tracing of federal and state multilingual trajectories reveal that two of the hypothesis’ observable implications are absent: there is no evidence of radical institutional change and ostensibly “new” multilingual pathways were in fact established prior to the pandemic. In light of this evidence, the article concludes by discussing alternative understandings of COVID-19’s effects and this might mean for the study of the pandemic moving forward.