Language Rights as Human Rights by Stephen MayIn the last eighty years, we have seen the growing development and articulation of human rights, particularly within international law and within and across supranational organizations. However, in that period, the right to maintain one’s language(s), without discrimination, remains peculiarly under-represented and/or problematized as a key human right, particularly for ethnolinguistic minorities. This is primarily because the recognition of language rights presupposes a recognition of the importance of wider group memberships and social contexts–conceptions that ostensibly militate against the primacy of individual rights in the post-Second World War era.
Drawing on sociolinguistics, sociology, political theory, and human rights law, this interdisciplinary article will explore the contestation over language rights during this period and the ongoing reluctance to acknowledge the collective rights of ethnolinguistic minorities within modern nation-states and national and international law. I will first discuss the modern nation-state system’s emphasis on (public) linguistic homogeneity, given that this underpins our current understanding of the distinction between majority/minority languages and the socio-historical and sociopolitical marginalization of the latter. Drawing on sociology and anthropology, I next codify, to the degree possible, who constitutes an ethnolinguistic minority. I then turn to debates in political theory concerning language and citizenship, as well as debates in international law over whether to include and/or accommodate (minority) language rights within the wider framework of human rights. In so doing, I chart recent developments that are more accommodating of a collective understanding of language rights. I conclude by examining the implications of these debates for the (still nascent) recognition of minority language rights in both national and supranational contexts, with a particular focus on Indigenous language rights.
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