ABSTRACT
In Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Van Parijs 2011a, henceforth LJ), I argue that the dissemination of English as a lingua franca needs to fostered, but also that the resulting dominance of English tends to create injustice in three senses: free riding or cooperative injustice, unequal opportunities or distributive injustice and the violation of parity of esteem. The strategies I recommend in order to address cooperative and distributive justice have one by-product in common: a further strengthening of the dominance of English. Linguistic justice, however, is also a matter of parity of esteem. And the strategy best suited to pursue justice in this sense, I argue, requires that one should allow all language communities to ‘grab a territory’, that is to impose their language in public education and public communication within some territorial boundaries. Hence, LJ’s bottom line could roughly be captured in the simple formula: lingua franca + linguistic territoriality.
