Linguistic rights

[David Wright]

Frances Karttunen recently posted an interesting message containing the following paragraph:

"People who are struggling just to live find the issue that Mark considers
grave--that of maintaining indigenous languages and letting them be
studied--of little urgency by comparison with making sure their children
survive and have some sort of future.  That route is generally perceived as
through making children monolingual in the dominant culture's language, even
though that means losing their own language heritage.  Linguists find this
hard to take, but it's really not our business to preach to people weighing
physical survival against language survival.  (This is true worldwide.  At
least half the languages of the world will probably no longer be spoken by
anyone after another generation or two.)"

Linguistic extinction can be avoided by guaranteeing linguistic rights. The process involves reeducating societies, on local, regional, national and international levels, much as the environmental and feminist movements have done since around 1970. A few years ago a serious attempt was made to define the linguistic rights of peoples: the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. The project was initiated in 1994 by International PEN's Translations and Linguistic Rights Committee, with the collaboration of the Escarré International Centre for Ethnic Minorities and Nations. A large international interdisciplinary team, including writers, linguists, specialists in international law and representatives of ethnic minorities from several continents, produced twelve drafts, culminating in the declaration which was presented in Barcelona in 1996. This document is now under consideration in a UNESCO committee for adoption by the UN as an international convention. Meanwhile, this document has inspired legislative initiatives in Guatemala and Mexico. Those interested may visit the Web site at:

http://www.troc.es/mercator/dudl-gb.htm

Perhaps one of the most important points is that, by insuring a linguistic community's rights to use its language within its territory, one of the benefits would be the creation of relatively well-paid and high-prestige jobs for those who are fluent and literate in their mother tongue, thus addressing the problem that Frances Karttunen accurately described in the paragraph quoted above.

Peace,

David Wright
Follow-Up Scientific Council
Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
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