ABSTRACT
The first has to do with the relationship between discourses of rights and sociolinguistic discourses of language. The problem of linguistic discrimination is one that takes its very shape from the way language is bound up in the construction of the State. The equation of language with nation, and nation with monolingualism (and with the development of standard languages) lays the groundwork for the construction of the very idea of a bounded ‘language’, and for the construction of hierarchies of legitimacy which marginalize and stigmatize non-national ‘languages’ or linguistic varieties (which do of course indeed get constructed as ‘dialects’, ‘patois’, ‘jargon’, ‘gibberish’ and so on, that is, not as ‘languages’ at all). Resistance to this process can take many forms, but the dominant form of resistance that we have witnessed in the past forty or so years has been to attack linguistic discrimination in its own terms. That is, rather than rejecting the principles that make such social injustice possible (the notion of ‘language’, the language-nation equation, and so on), groups have rejected the categorization of some languages and nations as more legitimate
than others. Linguistic minority movements tend to argue not that languages and nations should not be equated, but rather that some nations have been given an unfair deal, and that they should have their own language-nation-State nexus. A great deal of dialectological and sociolinguistic work has been involved in these debates, taking for granted the possibility of establishing expert discourses which can disambiguate boundaries and identify groups. Such sociolinguistic discourses do fit well with the primary means nation-States have for adjudicating social justice problems, namely, to accept the fundamental existence of groups as the basis of collective rights.
