Language Rights and Political Theory: Context, Issues, and Approaches

Political theory in the last decade has been awash with discussions of cultural diversity and ethnic, racial, and religious pluralism, with books exploring ‘the ethos of pluralization’, ‘strange multiplicity’, and ‘the politics of recognition’. Yet there is one form of diversity which has received relatively little attention from political theorists: linguistic diversity. To our knowledge, there has not been a single monograph or edited volume which examines the issue of language rights from the perspective of normative political theory. This is a striking gap when compared with the many important volumes by political theorists dedicated to issues of race (Mills 1997; Cochran 1999; Gutmann and Appiah 1996), indigenous people (Ivison, Sanders, and Patton 2000; Poole and Kukathas 2000; Tully 1995), immigration (Bauböck 1995; Cole 2000; Bader 1997; Rubio-Marín 2000), nationalism (Tamir 1993; Canovan 1996; Miller 1995; 2000; Miscevic 2000; Moore 2001); and religion (Audi 2000; Rosenblum 2000; SpinnerHalev 2000). In each of these areas, there is a vibrant debate amongst political theorists about how rights claims relating to these forms of diversity connect with liberal-democratic principles of freedom, justice, and democracy. There are welldeveloped ‘liberal theories of immigration’ or ‘liberal theories of nationalism’, for example, as well as criticisms of such theories by communitarians, feminists, civic republicans, postmodernists, and others.1 By contrast, one would be hard-pressed to know where to look to find an articulation of a normative theory of language rights, whether liberal, communitarian, post-colonial, or otherwise. Fortunately, this surprising gap is now being remedied. The past few years have witnessed the publication of several articles and chapters on the implications of normative principles of freedom and equality for language policy (for example, Van Parijs 2000a; 2002; Carens 2000: 77–87; Bauböck 2001;