ABSTRACT
Commenting on issues such as linguistic rights involves one in rather classic moral dilemmas, dilemmas that often characterize the work of socially committed scientists: we believe we know what is right, but what is right does not work in practice, either because it is just not the way in which reality works, or because the people don’ t believe it is right. 1 In the case of linguistic rights we face a situation in which on the one hand, there are hardly any arguments against linguistic human rights, except for the brutal fact that a practical approach based on this rights paradigm either does not work or even backfires. The world does not fit the linguistic rights paradigm. And now we can do two things: either insist on the correctness of our thesis, or try to understand the reasons why it does not work. I opt for the second tactic.
