Essentialist conceptions about language, and the relationship between language and other things, are still quite usual in society, and to some degree in linguistics. It is of special pertinence when working with specific (named or unnamed) languages in multilingual settings, or with one specific (named or unnamed) language variety amid many. This paper explores how essentialism shows in a collection of macro-sociolinguistic research articles on Afrikaans in modern, multilingual South Africa via critical discourse analysis. The results point out that subtle and covert indications of a degree of essentialism are rather usual in the data, and even expressly essentialist statements and claims are not totally lacking. Some counter-examples of and challenges to essentialism in the data are also examined, albeit they are found to be less usual than covert instances of essentialism. Proposals concerning a few essentialism-linked problems that emerge from the data are debated briefly.