Can parity of self-esteem serve as the basis of the principle of linguistic territoriality?

Philippe Van Parijs’ Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World makes two main claims. The first is that it is a good thing that a lingua franca is emerging in the world today. A global lingua franca is required for the creation of a trans-national demos, which is itself a requirement of egalitarian justice (Van Parijs 2011, p. 28). That the global lingua franca is English (rather than, say, an artificial language at equal linguistic distance from natural languages) poses problems of distributive justice. Native speakers of other languages must make investments in order to learn the emerging lingua franca that native English-speakers do not have to make. But Van Parijs argues that the overcoming of this asymmetry does not require the setting up of complex mechanisms of redistribution. The ubiquity of English is in a sense both the problem, and the source of a solution. While it imposes costs on others, it also provides speakers of other languages a way to meet those costs by allowing them the means to acquire the language cheaply.