Claims by minority groups to use their own languages in different social contexts are often presented as claims for “linguistic justice”, that is, justice as between speakers of different languages. This article considers how the language of international law can be used to advance such claims, by exploring how international law, as a discourse, approaches questions of language policy. This analysis reveals that international legal texts structure their engagement with “linguistic justice” around two key concepts: equality and culture. Through a (...) close examination of the way in which these concepts function within international legal discourse, the article suggests that this conceptual framework may sometimes constrain, as well as enlarge, the possibilities for justice for minority language speakers. Thus while international law may provide a language for challenging injustices in the linguistic sphere, limitations inherent in this discourse may also restrict its emancipatory potential. (shrink)

The term “political” egalitarianism is used here, not to refer to equality within the political sphere, but rather in John Rawls’s sense, to refer to a conception of egalitarian distributive justice that is capable of serving as the object of an overlapping consensus in a pluralistic society.1 Thus “political” egalitarianism is political in the same way that Rawls’s “political” liberalism is political. The central task when it comes to developing such a conception of equality is to determine what constraints a (...) principle of equality must satisfy in order to qualify as “freestanding,” or to be justifiable in a way that does not presuppose the correctness of any one member of the set of reasonable yet incompatible “religious, philosophical and moral” doctrines that attract large numbers of adherents in our world.2 (Rawls uses the analogy of a “module” in order to describe the way that a properly political conception of justice “fits into and can be supported by various reasonable comprehensive doctrines that endure in the society regulated by it.”3 Political egalitarianism would be “modular” in this sense.) Rather than getting embroiled in the controversies that have arisen over Rawls’s formulation of this idea, I would like simply to accept the intuition, widespread among political philosophers, that equality is the sort of principle that – if given a proper formulation – could satisfy the requirements of a political conception of justice. After all, regardless of what peoples’ projects, values, or conceptions of the good life may be, it should be possible to design a set of arrangements that would provide equal opportunity to pursue these goals, or that would treat each conception of the good with equal respect, etc. From this perspective, the principle of equality resembles the principle of Pareto-efficiency, or certain formulations of the principle of liberty – it is one that everyone should be able to endorse, insofar as it does not privilege, or presuppose the correctness of, any particular set of projects, values.. (shrink)

English today seems to be emerging as a global lingua franca. And a global lingua franca would be a global public good. Characteristically, being non-excludable, public goods are susceptible to free-riding: absent targeted distributive policies, some individuals can accrue a good’s benefits without having contributed to the costs of its production. In this paper, I make two arguments. First, I argue, against Philippe Van Parijs, that Anglophones are not unfairly free-riding on the efforts of non-Anglophones of producing English as a (...) global lingua franca. I defend the view that instances of what counts as unfair free-riding should be limited to free-riding on public goods that are co-operatively produced. Second, I suggest an alternative claim that is available for Van Parijs to make. Van Parijs believes a global lingua franca is required by global justice. This is a highly controversial claim. But if he is right, then Anglophones' free-riding on the global lingua franca while not an instance of unfair free-riding, may be objectionable nonetheless. (shrink)

As a step towards a systematic comparative evaluation of the fairness of different language policies, a rationale is presented for the design of an index of linguistic justice based on public policy analysis. The approach taken is to define a ‘minimum threshold of linguistic justice’ with respect to government language policy in three domains: law and order, public administration, and essential services. A hypothetical situation of pure equality and freedom in the choice of language used by all members of society (...) in communicating with the state is used as a theoretical benchmark to study the distributive effects of policy alternatives. Departures from this standard incur lower scores. Indicators are chosen to assess effective access to three kinds of language rights: toleration (the lack of state interference in private language choices), accommodation (accessibility of public services in different languages), and compensation (symbolic and practical recognition of languages outside the dominant one). In order to take account of the cost-benefit trade-offs involved in providing language-related goods to language groups of varying sizes, a method is adopted for weighting scores with respect to compensation rights so that lack of recognition for larger groups incurs greater penalties, while factoring in the particular characteristics of each language-related good. A trial set of ten indicators illustrates the compromises entailed in balancing theoretical rigour with empirical feasibility. (shrink)