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Linguistic Legitimacy, Language Rights and Social Justice: ‘No one is free when others are oppressed’

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Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice

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Abstract

The ideology of linguistic legitimacy is important because it entails the delegitimation of the identity of the individual and the group of which she or he is a member. In the educational domain, this has implications for the child’s ability to function effectively in the language of the school, on language attitudes and beliefs about students and student ability, on the acquisition of literacy, and for virtually all aspects of academic achievement. In addition, the rejection of the individual’s language constitutes a violation of language rights. In this concluding chapter, it is argued that a rejection of the concept of linguistic illegitimacy is required, especially in educational settings, if there is to be any meaningful commitment to social justice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The issue of language rights is a complex one, fraught in a number of ways. It has become common in the technical literature to distinguish between language rights and linguistic human rights (see Faingold, 2018; Grin, 2005; Hamel, 1997; Kontra, Phillipson, Skutnabb-Kangas, & Várady, 1999; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, in collaboration with Rannut, 1995). Skutnabb-Kangas (2000, pp. 482–487) has suggested that language rights differ from linguistic human rights in terms of what is necessary, as opposed to what is desirable (that is, what is enrichment-oriented). Linguistic human rights (that is, language rights plus human rights) are those which are required to meet basic human needs and to live a dignified life (such as having a language-related identity, access to one’s mother tongue, the right of access to an official language, at least primary education in one’s mother tongue, etc.). It is thus really with linguistic human rights that we are concerned here.

  2. 2.

    Although I have used the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities as the key agreement on linguistic human rights here for heuristic purposes, it is actually only one of many such international agreements. Other international agreements that address issues of language rights include the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (commonly called the ‘Barcelona Declaration’) (1996), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1988), and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1992).

  3. 3.

    The use of the phrase ‘minority languages’ here is somewhat problematic, since in some cases the language(s) involved are those spoken by the majority of citizens of the country, or a majority of individuals in a particular region of a country. Further, as Stephen May has pointed out, “the same language may be regarded as both a majority and minority language, depending on the context … Spanish is a majority language in Spain and many Latin American states, but a minority language in the United States” (2006, p. 260).

  4. 4.

    Banks does not explicitly raise the issues of language and language diversity in this particular quote, but given the focus and concerns of the corpus of his work—which is very sensitive to linguistic issues—it is appropriate to add these issues here, as I have done. See Banks (1993, 2008, 2015, 2017), and Banks and Banks (2010).

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  1. College of Education & Human Development, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA

    Timothy Reagan

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Reagan, T. (2019). Linguistic Legitimacy, Language Rights and Social Justice: ‘No one is free when others are oppressed’. In: Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10967-7_11

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