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Promoting linguistic vitality through public policy: The role of rules, costs and incentives
Edited by Bengt-Arne Wickström, Noémi Nagy, Anneliese Rieger-Roschitz and Balázs Vizi
[Language Problems and Language Planning 47:2] 2023
► pp. 136–159

Is minority language use a right or a privilege?

European institutions’ contribution to the decline of linguistic diversity

ORCID logo | University of Szeged | HUN-REN Center for Social Sciences | Central European University | Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania

This paper demonstrates how European institutions bend to the idea of the mono-ethnic and monolingual nation-state. Instead of encouraging the use of minority languages and accepting them as a value, minority languages are treated as a tolerated but voluntarily assumed handicap. This is in stark contrast to the treatment of other types of protected identities, such as religion, gender and sexual orientation. Against this background, there is a desperate need for clear value-setting by the European institutions and for a clear message that language shaming is not a venial sin of the monolingual nation-state but a no-go zone even for populists. For this, however, language chauvinism should not be condoned but condemned.

Keywords: European institutions, human rights, language discrimination, monolingualism, nation-state
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The idea of the monolingual nation-state
  • 3.Three methods of denying language rights
    • 3.1Ostrich policy: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
    • 3.2Outspoken disregard of the law
    • 3.3Cross-category benchmarking: Can antidiscrimination law be discriminatory?
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.00103.nag
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