Widespread scholarly and political attention to language-related inequities in the 20th century precipitated a spate of orientations to language planning in multilingual societies. While various orientations indicate a shift from earlier deficit to affirmative views of multilingualism, vigorous debates persist about the logical and pragmatic merits of each orientation. The resulting advocacy for language and multilingualism has yet to result in widespread mother-language-based multilingual education policies and practices. This article reviews a strand of these debates (language as right or resource) and argues that these debates deploy stringent criteria of rationality and social justice that are discontinuous with empirical realities of multilingualism and plurilingualism. It uses ethnographic evidence from India and Nigeria to demonstrate that, instead of the fixities of such criteria, actual language decision making in complex multilingual societies demands an integrative approach to theory, policy, and practice that is dialogic, tentative, and promotive of all possible languages.