Linguistic Justice and Endangered Languages

This contribution will engage with Van Parijs’s approach to linguistic justice and his working principles for the reduction of unfairness in the language domain (in particular, the need for intervention and his territorial principle), reflecting on a range of cases of multilingual practice and linguistic coexistence – respectively, in the multilingual capital of the world which is London today; in Fryslân, the minority language area in northern Netherlands; and in Europe, through its European Charter of Regional Minority Languages.

Overall, my argument, on a theoretical level, is for the further exploration of the relationship between linguistic diversity and human rights in civil society; and, on a practical level, for the development of a World Language Atlas as envisaged by UNESCO, containing vital information on all the world’s languages – an urgently needed basic resource for policy-making, to ensure, especially for the world’s many endangered languages, the linguistic justice and fairness advocated by Van Parijs.