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If there is one point that the critics of liberalism almost all agree upon, it is that liberal neutrality is an unappealing and perhaps incoherent doctrine. Many contemporary liberals do not endorse the idea of neutrality, and even those liberals most identified with the idea have backed off it in certain respects. In thinking about the challenges posed by cultural and linguistic diversity, the idea of neutrality seems especially unpromising. Nobody has made this point as clearly or forcefully as Will Kymlicka. 'The idea that government could be neutral with respect to ethnic and national groups', he argues, 'is patently false'. 'In the areas of official languages, political boundaries, and the division of powers, there is no way to avoid supporting this or that societal culture'. The aim of the present paper is to challenge this widely accepted assumption that liberal neutrality is irrelevant to thinking about cultural and linguistic diversity. Focusing on the problem of language policy, I argue that liberal neutrality represents a coherent position that should play a modest, but not negligible, role in the construction of a normative theory of language politics. A rehabilitation of the idea of liberal neutrality as part of what I will call a 'hybrid' theory of language policy points to a distinctive and appealing way of making the case for minority language rights and also to an understanding of the reasonable limits that can be placed on such rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]