ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the development of language rights (LR) as an academic paradigm, along with its key theoretical and contextual concerns. The growing presence of LR in the disciplines of sociolinguistics, the sociology of language, and language policy can be attributed to four distinct, albeit closely interrelated, academic movements. The first of these is the Language Ecology (LE) movement, charting the links between linguistics and ecology, and situating the current exponential loss of many of the world’s languages within a wider ecological framework. A second is the linguistic human rights (LHR) movement that argues, often based on LE premises, for the greater institutional protection and support of minority languages within both national and supranational contexts. These arguments are also echoed in the third domain of academic legal discourse that has developed with respect to minority group rights generally, but with an increasing focus on the specific implementation of minority language rights (MLR) in national and international law. A fourth, increasingly influential, position has seen a deliberate move away from the biological/ecological analyses of LE, and some LHR arguments, to a more overtly critical sociohistorical/sociopolitical analysis of language rights. This position continues to focus on the importance of minority language rights (MLR), while also addressing social constructionist and postmodernist understandings of language that highlight the constructedness of language(s) and the contingency of the language–identity link. The latter have too often been ignored in other MLR accounts, leading to an overly essentialized view of languages and those who speak them. Although these various positions are thus by no means uniform, there is sufficient overlap for them to constitute collectively an increasingly important field of academic inquiry and related advocacy about language rights.
