Linguistic Justice

Van Parijs and his Critics

Helder De Schutter, David Robichaud, Helder De Schutter, David Robichaud

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317292111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The world contains over 6000 languages and less than 200 states to accommodate them. This creates the important normative question of how to respond politically to linguistic diversity. What is a just language policy? Are language minorities entitled to language protection? Should language rights be accorded to immigrants? Is the universal rise of English as a lingua franca to be applauded or to be regretted?

The most important and comprehensive thinker within this debate over linguistic justice is Philippe Van Parijs. In his bold and controversial theory of linguistic justice, Van Parijs argues that the rise of English is a good thing, as well as that all language groups are entitled to grab a territory on which only their language receives public recognition.

This collection, bringing together some of the most influential contemporary political philosophers, presents a critical review of Van Parijs's theory and gives a state-of-the-art overview of the prevailing positions on linguistic justice within political philosophy. It will be of interest to students and scholars studying philosophy, politics, linguistics, international relations and law.

This book was published as a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Van Parijsian linguistic justice – context, analysis and critiques

Helder De Schutter^a, ^b and David Robichaud^a,b

^aInstitute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; ^bDepartment of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

This introduction does three things. We first give an overview of the linguistic justice debate in normative political philosophy. We then situate Philippe Van Parijs’s position within it, by zooming in on Van Parijs’s two major normative claims: the support of the rise of English as the global lingua franca and the defence of linguistic territoriality. Finally, we clarify how each of the essays that follow this introduction relates to those two claims.

In 2011, Philippe Van Parijs has published Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World. As the first full-fledged normative theory of language policy, it is a landmark publication for linguistic justice theory. This collection of essays contains responses to Van Parijs’s book from some of the most well known theorists of linguistic justice today.

The goal of this introductory paper is to indicate what linguistic justice is about, to sketch Van Parijs’s theory of linguistic justice and to explain the relationship of the ensuing papers to that theory. As we will explain, Van Parijsian linguistic justice rests on two normative pillars: the argument for English as a global lingua franca (EGLF) and the argument that each language group is entitled to a policy of official monolingualism within its territory. Four of the papers following this paper (by Sue Wright, Stephen May, Denise Réaume and David Robichaud) focus on the first pillar. The remaining four papers (by Anna Stilz, Jean Laponce, Daniel Weinstock and Rainer Bauböck) focus on the second, the argument for linguistic territoriality.

Section 1 introduces the recent linguistic justice field, develops a framework for understanding its internal diversity and gives a brief sketch of the theories that have appeared. Section 2 summarizes Van Parijs’s theory within the background offered in Section 1. Section 3 gives an overview of the essays that follow this introduction in this special issue.

Section 1

The linguistic justice debate is a development within contemporary political philosophy. It is a recent debate. Only in the past decade have several theorists started to come up with some articulations of what linguistic justice amounts to. In 2003, a collection of essays was published on this matter (Kymlicka and Patten 2003). Van Parijs’s Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World, which is the subject of this collection of essays, is the first monograph dedicated to working out a theory of linguistic justice.

Theories of linguistic justice provide an answer to the question: what is the just political management of the presence of different language groups within a political community? This question comprises different sub-questions: Should we go for equality or inequality of recognition between the different languages? Should we go for sub-state territories with monolingual policies, or for states that instantiate statewide multilingualism or for some combination of both? Should linguistic minorities receive special linguistic benefits? Should we endeavour to save moribund languages? Should states have one common language that all speak and understand?

In what follows we first describe the development of this small field of research in political philosophy, before giving a stylized overview of the field by focusing on the most common principles of linguistic justice that have been proposed, and on the normative grounds on which those principles rest.

The linguistic justice debate has two direct antecedents. First, it derives a large part of its driving force from the liberalism-communitarianism debate that animated political philosophy in the 80s. In this debate, communitarians like Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor questioned the individualistic and a cultural atomism of the liberalism of political philosophers like John Rawls or Ronald Dworkin. In contrast to liberal atomism, they set out to develop a more culturally embedded picture of the self, whose identity is not understood as autonomously constructed but rather as largely derived from cultural and linguistic media.

The second and more direct contemporary antecedent is formed by the nationalism and multiculturalism debate. In the beginning of the 90s, important attempts have been made to bridge the gap between liberal thought and communitarian concerns, and to make the liberal premise of individual autonomy compatible with the idea of cultural embeddedness. A crucial figure in this second source of influence for the linguistic justice debate is Will Kymlicka, whose argument is, in a nutshell, that (the liberal ideal of) individual autonomy requires a cultural context of choice (Kymlicka 1995, p. 83). This thesis is also present in some form in the accounts of other liberal nationalists (like Miller 1995, Tamir 1995, Moore 2001, Gans 2003) and liberal multiculturalists (like Raz 1995, Carens 2000). Liberal nationalists and multiculturalists are united in defending the moral and political importance of cultural membership, as well as what they see as the political result of this view, the idea that the just accommodation of cultural difference implies granting cultural minority groups minority (or group-differentiated) rights to state support.

Both ideas are rejected by a wide group of theorists who wish to reject the idea of granting special rights to cultural minorities. Some of these favour the liberal ideal of ‘culturally blind’ political regimes. The best accommodation of diversity and identity pluralism, they say, is a strong separation between the sphere of politics and the sphere of culture and identity. The state should not publicly uphold or prioritize some conceptions of identity or the good life, say the Catholic view, over others that are thereby subordinated. Therefore, what the state has to do is to detach itself, to remain silent over these issues, by not adopting or publicly endorsing any such position at all (see Barry 2001, Kukathas 2003).

Many of the same patterns and positions of the previous two debates are now re-emerging as linguistic justice views. But the linguistic justice debate has one apparent advantage over other debates over identity: it is easier to show for language than for other types of identity-based difference that it is impossible for the state to take its hands off the field of language altogether. In the debate over religious or even national attachments, it is not always easy to argue against the strict separation between the domain of the political and the domain of non-political attachments. The default position in the religious debate, for example, seems to be that the state should adopt a neutral hands-off position. Those who defend special rights for religions then have to come up with complicated arguments for the non-neutrality of states. But this default position is clearly ruled out from the start in the linguistic justice debate. The reason is that states need a way to communicate with citizens: states have constitutions, laws and public schools, and in each case, specific languages must be used for this communication. Kymlicka has argued this most forcefully: ‘The state can (and should) replace religious oaths in courts with secular oaths, but it cannot replace the use of English in courts with no language’ (1995, p. 111). This impossibility is most clearly the case with respect to language: the language public officials use in their interactions with citizens, the language in which the constitution is written, in which the national anthem is sung at official ceremonies, in which passports are printed, in which courts operate, in which public media function, in which primary education occurs, etc. is inevitably situated and not neutral.

So responding to sub-state linguistic diversity with political disestablishment is impossible. States are inevitably linguistically impregnated and we cannot avoid having language policies. As far as linguistic justice is concerned, concepts like ‘benign neglect’ or ‘laissez-faire’ or ‘neutrality’ are confusing (but see Patten (2003) for an account of linguistic neutrality that is not based on disestablishment). We do not have a choice between freedom and regulation, or between neutrality and engagement. Rather we must choose between different forms of regulation and engagement, between different language policies.

Two principles of regulation are common in the linguistic justice field, and most theorists lean towards one or the other. The first principle is to argue for equal treatment of the language groups from the point of view of the state. If the state houses more than one language group, then the ideal is to recognize all of them on a basis of equality. States like Switzerland, Belgium, South Africa, Canada or Spain aspire to realize such a principle (even if existing realities may often be imperfect approximations of that ideal). On this view, states could for instance grant all speakers alike the right to receive state services in their own language. Instruction might have to be offered in all the official languages in public schools. Street signs might all be rendered in those languages and so on. Different modalities exist for the realization of this principle. For example, we could divide the state into multiple territorial units and mandate one official language per territorial unit. Doing so instantiates a territoriality principle, according to which language rights depend on where one is located within the state (as advocated by Laponce (1987), Van Parijs (2011) and Bauböck in this collection). Or we could officially recognize all the official languages in all the units. This then instantiates a personality principle, according to which language rights track the persons wherever they find themselves in the state (as advocated by Réaume (2003) and Patten (2014, pp. 227–231)).

A second position argues for the idea that we should converge on one shared language. States may house more than one established language group, but the state’s recognition should only recognize one of those languages. We may for example choose the language that gives speakers access to the widest set of opportunities (see Barry 2001, Pogge 2003, Stilz 2009), or the language of the majority of the speakers, or the most prestigious language, or the language that is easiest to learn for the other speakers, perhaps because it is linguistically the least far removed from the other languages on average (see Ginsburgh and Weber 2011) and so on.

The particular principle of state recognition that is favoured, as well as the particular language(s) that will be singled out for state support, will depend on an underlying account of the goal of language, of what language is thought to be good for. Linguistic justice theorists usually ground their theories in one or more interests in language, which language recognition can then advance. Within the possible set of interests, there are two broad types, which we can term ‘identity’ interests and ‘non-identity’ interests.

A first position holds that policies should seek to accommodate people’s identity interests in language. Language policies can seek to recognize the identities associated with a specific language. For example, when language groups such as the Québécois are able to claim language rights, or when the EU holds an official multilingual language policy rather than organizing everything only in one language, such recognition is given in order to satisfy people’s identity interest in their own language. This position sees people’s identity interests in language as important enough for language policy to take them into account and to accord language rights to language groups. In devising language policies, language communities should be treated as communities of identity. Scholars like Taylor (1994), Kymlicka (1995), Patten (2001) and Van Parijs (2011) have expounded this view. When referring to such arguments, we will call them ‘identity’ arguments in favor of recognition. Two such identity arguments stand out since they have become important within the field.

The most commonly referred to identity argument states that language recognition serves an interest in individual autonomy (or freedom). Autonomy, so the argument goes, requires the disposition of a set of options to choose from. Languages and cultures are option packages: they provide us with the options available to us and with the means to evaluate options. Languages and cultures are therefore ‘contexts of choice’. Versions of this argument have been put forward by liberal nationalists and liberal multiculturalists, and in basing a linguistic justice theory on the autonomy argument, scholars directly borrow from those antecedents. The argument has been endorsed by, among others, Taylor (1993, pp. 46–47), Kymlicka (1995, p. 83), Raz (1995) and Gans (2003).

This autonomy idea is based on the view that we perceive the world in the linguistic terms passed on to us by our family and people. As a result, we need access to our language (and our language tradition) to be full human beings, to receive a (first) position. Language groups share similar ways of perceiving the world and of perceiving the value of objects within that world. What Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz say of ‘encompassing groups’ (which often share a language) is also true of language groups on the autonomy argument: they share ‘implicit knowledge of how to do what, of tacit conventions regarding what is part of this or that enterprise and what is not, what is appropriate and what is not, what is valuable and what is not’ (Margalit and Raz 1995, p. 86). As a result, without knowledge of the language spoken in the society in which one lives, or when speaking a language which is too small to sustain a full context of choice, one does not have equal access to a set of choices.

This argument has a substantial philosophical pedigree. The idea on which it relies is that language provides people with the means to fully realize themselves. Why is this so? Because to fully realize themselves, people need a horizon of meaning, and this horizon is always (partly) linguistic. The language we speak in a sense discloses the world to us in a situated way. This idea has been cogently expressed by Gadamer, who has argued that to have a world we need to have a language (1975, p. 411). For Gadamer, and for people in the romantic tradition like Johann Gottlieb Herder and today Charles Taylor alike, language structures the horizon within which our experience of the world unfolds (1975, p. 145). Therefore, ‘language is the real mark of our finitude’, the limits of our language are the limits of our horizon (1976, p. 64). It is only through expressing a thought in our specific language that we are able to come to an understanding of something expressed in another language. Likewise, Herder has argued that if we lose the disposition to think in the language in which we are brought up, we lose ourselves and also the world (Herder 1877, Vol. XVIII, p. 36).

Why should this language identity interest in autonomy be politically secured? The step from having an interest in my language as the context of my freedom and self-realization to state recognition of this language is predicated on the idea that states must take an interest in providing individuals with the necessary preconditions of realizing themselves as full human beings and of leading a good life. If it is taken for granted that the conditions of individual identity must be politically respected and secured, then we can conclude from the self-realization function of language that the state ought to take the identity and self-realization interest in language seriously.

A second identity interest that can be relied upon by language policy theorists is dignity. Rather than being grounded in a concern about the horizon-structuring role of language that was central to the social theory of Romanticism, the concern about linguistic dignity is older and goes back to the defence of European vernaculars in early modern Renaissance thought. According to this view, using someone’s language or affirming its status is a way of promoting that person or that group’s dignity. A language is a source of collective and personal self-respect and dignity.

According to the linguistic justice theorists who appeal to the dignity interest, people’s self-respect and dignity are often affected by the state of their language and by the esteem their language gets from others. Self-respect and dignity, in turn, are themselves very important goods. They provide us with a basis of self-confidence and a belief in our own worth, which are essential to live a full life.

Many contemporary political philosophers have emphasized the importance of self-respect and dignity to theories of justice. Rawls, for example, has attached great value to the importance of self-respect, which he sees as ‘perhaps the most important primary good’ (1999, p. 386). He also argues that ‘self-respect depends upon and is encouraged by certain public features of basic social institutions’, and he argues that this social base of self-respect is among the most essential primary goods (1999, p. 319). Talking about the social bases of self-respect, he says:

these bases are those aspects of basic institutions normally essential if citizens are to have a lively sense of their own worth as persons and to be able to develop and exercise their moral powers and to advance their aims and ends with self-confidence. (1996, pp. 308–309)

On the linguistic dignity view, one such ‘aspect of basic institutions’ essential to believing in one’s own worth and to having self-confidence is equal recognition of one’s language. If there are several language groups in a given state, all of which are recognized but unequally so, then this is felt as a direct assault on the dignity of the lesser-recognized languages. If a language is not equally respected, then the dignity and self-respect of its members are negatively affected. As Van Parijs, who grounds his theory of linguistic justice in the importance of ‘equal dignity’ or ‘parity of esteem’, puts it:

[i]n a situation in which people’s collective identities are closely linked to their native language, there arises a major threat to the recognition of an equal status to all as soon as the native language of some is given what is unquestionably a superior function. (Van Parijs 2011, pp. 3–4)

So people’s self-respect and dignity are often affected by the esteem their language gets from others or from the state. We might then justify different language policies by appealing to the importance of language recognition for individuals’ dignity.

But languages are not only bearers of identity, they can also serve inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Van Parijsian linguistic justice – context, analysis and critiques
• 2. What is language? A response to Philippe van Parijs
• 3. The problem with English(es) and linguistic (in)justice. Addressing the limits of liberal egalitarian accounts of language
• 4. Lingua franca fever: sceptical remarks
• 5. Cooperative justice and English as a lingua franca: the tension between optimism and Anglophones free riding
• 6. Language, dignity, and territory
• 7. One-way conversation with Philippe Van Parijs
• 8. Can parity of self-esteem serve as the basis of the principle of linguistic territoriality?
• 9. The political value of languages
• 10. Lingua franca and linguistic territoriality. Why they both matter to justice and why justice matters for both
• Index