Speaking Freely · Linguistic Domination, Republicanism and Federalism

Speaking Freely: Linguistic Domination, Republicanism and Federalism

‘Speaking Freely: Linguistic Domination, Republicanism and Federalism’ developed a new approach to the burgeoning academic field of linguistic justice, which concerns the fair and ethnical management of linguistic diversity in plural societies. Until now, scholars working on it have focused on questions like: Which principles should guide political institutions facing linguistic diversity? Should we treat all languages equally or prioritize some of them? What language rights should people have? This project broke new ground by directing attention to the issue of authority, centering the question of who is entitled to make decisions about the use, regulation and official status of different languages. The project was premised on the idea that a complete theory of linguistic justice ought to be able to explain both how institutions should regulate language policies and who should have the authority to decide about linguistic matters. As well as providing the first sustained theoretical account of the second issue, the project was distinctive in addressing linguistic justice from a republican perspective, as opposed to the liberal approaches that predominate in the literature. Republicanism foregrounds one central moral wrong: domination. That is, the wrong of individuals or groups being under the arbitrary will or control of another (and hence, for republicans, being unfree). Linguistic domination is a specific kind of domination that comes in two forms: either interpersonal (where individuals and groups dominate one another) or at the state level (where state institutions dominate individuals and groups). This project focused on the latter, extending the Fellow's prior research that addressed the former. State level linguistic domination is especially important in countries where historically rooted language groups of different sizes and origins must coexist. In these societies, language is often an important marker of individual and collective identity, leading to conflicts both about language policies themselves as well as about who should be entitled to have a say: that is, who has a legitimate claim to linguistic authority. The main conclusions of ‘Speaking Freely’ were that the leading liberal theories of linguistic justice cannot adequately address the problem of linguistic domination, that a ‘multinational’ strand of federal political theory can better do so, and that some of the most severe forms of linguistic domination can by equipping minorities with veto powers over certain language policies.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union