ABSTRACT
Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World (Van Parijs 2011) is an important book within political philosophy and I welcome the opportunity to comment
on it – both in terms of the normative liberal egalitarian assumptions that underpin it, as well as the robustness and reach of these assumptions when viewed through a different disciplinary lens. To the latter task, I bring my own interdisciplinary grounding in sociology and sociolinguistics. In what follows, I freely acknowledge the systematicity, significance, and sophistication of Van Parijs’ arguments in relation to language, the culmination of work he has been pursuing in this area over the last decade or so. Indeed, the significance of Linguistic Justice is precisely in providing us with a systematic account of the interrelationships between language, inclusion and mobility, and, in particular, their implications for furthering an egalitarian model of justice in a globalized world dominated by English.1
