• Home
  1. Home
  2. Linguistic human rights as a source of policy guidelines: A critical assessment
Scientific article
French

Linguistic human rights as a source of policy guidelines: A critical assessment

Contributors

Grin, François

Published in

Journal of Sociolinguistics, vol. 9, no. 3, no. 448-460, 2005

Publication date

2005

Abstract

The ‘linguistic human rights' (LHR) perspective, though relevant to the protection and promotion of minority languages (or, more generally, of linguistic diversity), displays one major weakness, namely, its almost exclusive reliance on moral considerations. Although LHR advocates often back up their claims with other (including economic) arguments, the latter often fail to pass ‘hard' validation tests. Hence, the actual import of LHR arguments is constrained by the extent towhich the underpinning moral considerations are shared by public opinion and politicians. Even if there is broad consensus around values, arguments in favour of minority language rights can be defeated by three types of objections that have to do with feasibility, costs, and burden sharing. In order to overcome these objections, it is necessary to draw on the tools of policy evaluation, which provides strong arguments in favour of linguistic diversity.

Keywords

  • Language policy
  • Language planning
  • Policy evaluation
  • Language rights
  • Efficiency
  • Cost-effectiveness
  • Fairness

UNIGE affiliation entities

Citation (ISO format)

GRIN, François. Linguistic human rights as a source of policy guidelines: A critical assessment. In: Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2005, vol. 9, n° 3, p. 2005.

Main files (1)

Article (Published version)

Identifiers

  • PID : unige:38211
674views
2downloads

Technical informations

Creation

14/05/2014 15:14:00

First validation

14/05/2014 15:14:00

Update

14/03/2023 21:23:54

Status update

14/03/2023 21:23:54

Last indexation

30/10/2024 19:12:59
All rights reserved by Archive ouverte UNIGE and the University of Geneva
OpenAIRE Indexed & Validated