Language Policies and Language Rights

This review is an overview of the newly developing field of language rights. It distinguishes between (a) historical/descriptive studies where language rights are treated as the resultant variable with no attempt to predict consequences, and (b) exhortatory and ideologically based studies in which language rights are considered a causal variable. An attempt at definitions follows, set within the field of language planning. Principal concerns, such as territoriality versus personality principles and individual versus collective rights, are discussed.

The review ends with an argument to consider language rights as emic rights, which is to say culture-language-context–specific rights, rather than to consider linguistic human rights from a universal rights perspective which overstates issues and masks rights to as also being rights against. We need a careful exploration of the nature of language rights and their consequences.