Testing for linguistic injustice: territoriality and pluralism

Abstract

This article develops a linguistic injustice test. Language policy measures passing the test conflict with the normative ideal of equal language recognition. The first part of the test checks for external restrictions – language policies that grant more recognition to one language group than to another. The second part of the test checks for internal restrictions – language policies that grant more recognition to some members of a language group than to other members of the same group. The article then applies the linguistic injustice test to two models of linguistic justice: linguistic territoriality and linguistic pluralism. It is argued that real-life cases of linguistic territoriality tend to pass the test. It is argued that instantiations of linguistic pluralism tend to fail the test.

Keywords:

• linguistic justice
• linguistic territoriality principle
• language policy
• linguistic nationalism
• Van Parijs

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Adam Clulow, Jean-François Grégoire, Michael Jewkes, Alan Patten, Brigitte Rath, Christine Straehle, and an anonymous reviewer of this journal for very helpful discussions and comments.

Notes

1. For a general overview of the linguistic justice debate, see Patten and Kymlicka (2003). Philippe Van Parijs has made the term “linguistic justice” famous, see his Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (2011). The first use of the term I encountered is in Réaume and Green (1991).

2. Whether or not languages of recent immigrants (such as Arabic or Turkish in Western Europe) should be awarded the same status that established languages enjoy is a thorny issue on which an interesting debate has emerged (see for example Patten 2014, 269–298). This complicated problem is one in which the argument of this article has no stakes: both equally recognizing immigrant languages and not doing so are compatible with my argument. To avoid unnecessary opposition, however, I limit myself in the text to non-immigrant languages.

3. The strict version is instantiated in most of Belgium and Switzerland. A weaker version stipulates that a territorial unit might extend recognition to more than one language group, but with inequality of recognition between the recognized languages. This version is discussed in Section 4 in the context of Quebec's Bill 101: it is instantiated in Quebec as well as in the 27 Belgian municipalities that are called communes à facilités or faciliteitengemeenten. My argument below applies to both the strict and the weak versions of the territoriality principle: I claim that both pass the linguistic injustice test.

4. I do not mean to argue that the only relevant principle in language policy is recognition. Language is also an instrument of communication and this will give rise to different reasons for language policies: for example, they will have to serve citizens' socio-economic needs and in several cases this will require support for languages of wider opportunity that are precisely not languages of identity. The present discussion is limited to arguments for language policy that seek to justify language recognition on the basis of people's language identity interests, and the question I ask in this article is: if we want to recognize language identities, should we then go for territoriality or pluralism?

5. A large consensus exists in political philosophy over this idea that we should treat all individuals with equal concern. See for example Ronald Dworkin's defense of it (2000). The crux, however, is what equality and equal concern mean precisely. I propose a more specific account of what equality implies in language policy below, in the described linguistic injustice test and in the last section of the article. See in particular Carens' notion of evenhandedness, Patten's equality of recognition and Réaume's multilingualism as equal recognition for similar applications of equality to language policy (Carens 2000; Patten 2001, 2014; Réaume forthcoming).

6. Section 73(2) of the Chartre de la Langue Française essentially grounds the eligibility requirements for a child to receive instruction in English in Quebec in whether the father or mother of the child received instruction in English in Canada.

7. Forced assimilation is an example of an external restriction: it involves one language group forcing members of another to give up their original language.

8. The supporters of the LTP usually promote it as a means of recognizing people's language identity interests, and it is also in this defense that I am interested here. It can also be defended from other angles, though many of the non-identity arguments will end up being critical of any form of language identity recognition, whether it comes in the form of territoriality or pluralism. However, one non-identity argument for the LTP has been proposed by Van Parijs. This is the pacification argument, according to which implementing firm and stable linguistic boundaries between officially monolingual units contributes to peace (2011, 5.7).

9. 23.1% indicate they speak Dutch well as opposed to 88.5% who claim to speak French well (Brio 2013).

10. The relevance of this bilingualism case may be more aptly recognized if we realize that “[h]alf the human race is known to be at least bilingual, and there are probably half as many bilinguals again in those parts of the world where there have been no studies, though cultural contacts are known to be high” (Crystal 2000, 45). Of course, the mere fact of being bilingual does not mean that one actually wants state recognition in both languages. Very often, some of the languages one knows were learned for instrumental benefits. In general, though, identity-based bilingualism is a vastly underestimated phenomenon, which must be taken into account in designing a theory of linguistic justice.

11. On the strict definition of territoriality, allowing only one language to be supported per territory, Loi 101 is in itself not an instantiation of a LTP, because within Quebec English public schools are provided to the Anglophones. But by, among other things, allowing English speakers to attend French public schools and not vice versa, Quebec sends out a clear signal that, even though English gets recognition, it is on the territory of Quebec committed more to the case of French than to the case of English: French gets more recognition than English on Quebec territory. It therefore fits a weaker definition of the LTP, stipulating that, while more than one language may get support per territory, territories will give preferential treatment to one among those languages.

12. One might also argue that not French monolingualism but linguistic diversity is a public good (see Boran 2003, 195; Grin 2003, 171–172, 185).

13. This does not mean that language survival policies are necessarily unjust. The claim is only that survivalist strategies that involve state-sanctioned internal restrictions (such as the LTP) are. Other survivalist strategies, financial or otherwise, are not necessarily touched by this argument.

14. See Patten (2003) and Réaume (2003), who both criticize linguistic territoriality from a perspective that falls under what I call linguistic pluralism.

15. The weaker version states that limited recognition can be given to another group as long as the language that is to be protected by a LTP receives recognitional priority. So this weaker version is not characterized by monolingual recognition, but it still is designed in order to give one preferential language more recognition.

16. Alan Patten takes the equal per-capita pro-rating scheme as the ethically appropriate default position (2001, 694, 711). Yet, he calls it the “default position” because he wants to allow for deviations from it in some cases. One such case is “where a language's decline threatens to exclude it altogether from key spheres of language use” (Patten 2001, 708). He thinks the empirical conditions that could motivate us to deviate from the default position are not that common, in part because a language's decline will be accompanied by the gradual acquisition of another language by its speakers.