The terms Critical Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) are often used interchangeably. In fact, recently the term CDA seems to have been preferred and is being used to denote the theory formerly identified as CL. The roots of CDA lie in classical Rhetoric, Text linguistics and Sociolinguistics, as well as in Applied Linguistics and Pragmatics (see also Wodak & Meyer 2001; Fairclough 2003; Wodak 2004; Renkema 2004; Blommaert 2005). Deconstructing the label of this research program – as thus considered by the author- entails that one has to define what CDA means when employing the terms “critical” and “discourse”. Most recently, Michael Billig (2003) has clearly pointed to the fact that CDA has become an established academic discipline with the same rituals and institutional practices as all other academic disciplines. Ironically, he asks the question whether this might mean that CDA has become “uncritical” – or if the use of acronyms such as CDA might serve the same purposes as in other traditional, non-critical disciplines; namely to exclude outsiders and to mystify the functions and intentions of the research. It is not possible to answer Billig’s questions extensively in this paper. Yet the author believes that he points to potentially very fruitful and necessary debates for CDA. It is necessary to stress that CDA has never been and has never attempted to be or to provide one single or specific theory. Neither is one specific methodology characteristic of research in CDA. Quite the contrary; studies in CDA are multifarious, derived from quite different theoretical backgrounds, oriented towards different data and methodologies. Researchers in CDA also rely on a variety of grammatical approaches. The definitions of the terms “discourse”, “critical”, “ideology”, “power” and so on are also manifold. Thus, any criticism of CDA should always specify which research or researcher they relate to. Most importantly, CDA sees “language as social practice” (Fairclough & Wodak 1997), and considers the “context of language use” to be crucial (Wodak 2000, Benke 2000). Defining features of CDA are its concern with power as a central condition in social life, and its efforts to develop a theory of language, which incorporates this as a major premise. Not only the notion of struggles for power and control, but also the intertextuality and recontextualization of competing discourses in various public spaces and genres are closely attended to.