Minority language rights to education in international, regional, and domestic regulations and practices: the case of Frisian in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This paper examines minority language education in the Dutch province of Fryslân from a rights-based approach. To conduct the analysis, we employed a qualitative (legal) content analysis. We explored minority language rights at different levels to answer the following question: To what extent are international and regional standards on minority-language education applied domestically to education in Frisian and through the medium of the Frisian language? We discuss the historical trends in the international community regarding minority-language education and elaborate specifically on the Netherlands’ shifting approach on the matter. Our analysis of international, regional, and domestic regulations shows that the issue of exemptions and the reduction in the Frisian core objectives have weakened the position of Frisian in education. Owing to the lack of proper implementation of the current regulations, the Netherlands has been deficient in fulfilling the right to mother-tongue education in Frisian primary schools. The analysis further shows that the Netherlands do not treat Frisian education as a right. Legal solutions to remedy this situation are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Language law
• language policy and planning
• multilingualism
• language contact
• human rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The variety of Frisian spoken in the Netherlands is also called West Frisian. Other Frisian varieties, namely North Frisian and East (Sater) Frisian, are spoken in Germany. In this paper, we use the common form ‘Frisian’ to refer to West Frisian.

2 The Covenant on Frisian Language and Culture contains chapters on: education; legal authorities, administration and public services; media; cultural activities and facilties; economic and social life; cross-border collaboration.

3 The Netherlands is divided into 12 provinces, each possessing some degree of authority in regulating their internal affairs (The Constitution of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, 2008, Chapter 7).

4 The province cannot act independently on granting exemptions. Upon schools’ application for exemptions, the provincial executive has to consult with representatives of Frisian primary education pending the approval of the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. That is to say, the ultimate granting of the exemption is subject to the approval of said Ministry (Overheid Wettenbank, 2021, Article 9 (6)).

5 See, for example, the European Court Marckx v. Belgium, Human Rights Committee, General Comment 18, Non-discrimination (Thirty-seventh session, 1989), and Jacobs v. Belgium Communication No. 943/2000, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/81/D/943/2000 (2004).

6 In 2018, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe changed this to every five years (CM/Del/Dec(2018)1330/10.4e).

7 Considering that there are around 500 primary schools in Fryslân, each school receives only 200 Euros of the total subsidy.

8 The asterisk indicates the repetition of the same recommendation in the next COMEX report.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zoha Bayat

Zoha Bayat (LLM, Tarbiat Modarres University of Tehran) is a PhD Candidate at Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, Utrecht University and a guest researcher at Fryske Akademy. Her research interests include linguistic rights, minority language education, language attitudes, and language policies. Her corpus of socio-linguistic research on minority languages and language policies, in conjunction with her legal expertise, is put to use in the interests of inter-disciplinary research.

Ruth Kircher

Ruth Kircher (PhD, Queen Mary University of London) is a researcher at the Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning as well as the Fryske Akademy. She is a sociolinguist with a specialisation in societal multilingualism and language contact situations, and she is particularly interested in language attitudes and ideologies. Her work focuses on three main strands relating to this: language learning among new speakers of minority languages, family language policy to promote intergenerational language transmission and childhood multilingualism, and language planning to promote the maintenance of minority languages.

Hans Van de Velde

Hans Van de Velde (PhD, Radboud University Nijmegen) is Professor of Sociolinguistics at Utrecht University and a senior researcher at the Fryske Akademy. He is a specialist in language variation and change, sociophonetics and standardization processes, and has worked extensively on regional variation in Dutch. At the Fryske Akademy he researches the Frisian minority language, Dutch and the mixed varieties spoken in the Fryslân province. He is also responsible for the digital research infrastructure for Frisian and the development of Frisian language tools, such as the online Dutch – Frisian dictionary, spell-checkers, automatic translation and speech recognition.