Conference Agenda

Language rights have much in common with economic, social, and cultural rights (e.g., rights to education and health care). Unlike civil rights, designed to negatively prevent a state from acting, economic, social, and cultural rights entail positive governmental obligations to provide services or to make accommodations.

The moral questions posed by language rights hinge crucially on language policies and their implementation. Addressing these moral questions more effectively requires better and more systematically gathered data about language policies globally, so as to provide sounder empirical bases for identifying language rights violations in situations of language conflict.

The key question at the center of most language-rights disputes is “Under what conditions is a government obligated to provide linguistic accommodations?” While the question is clear enough, the answer is not and can depend on the facts of any given situation. Advocates for minority-language rights, we argue, could benefit from being able to point to standards of equitable accommodations that should be expected across similar circumstances.

In this paper, we propose a framework for gathering such data and for providing systematic and objective assessments of language rights cases. The Language Freedom Index evaluates seventeen variables across major areas of language rights, including government, education, healthcare, and media. Scores are compiled into a single indicator that reflects the overall level of language freedom enjoyed by a linguistic community. To demonstrate the value of this index, we have gathered data from 77 language communities across 20 countries.

Our results demonstrate a strong, logarithmic relationship between language freedom and demographic strength. Evaluating the distribution of language rights globally is, we propose, crucial to better understanding the social and geopolitical effects of language policy in general. This index also has the promise of providing minority-rights advocates with an instrument to identify and effectively challenge language-rights violations.

This project compares five official language action plans and roadmaps developed by the Canadian federal government between 2003 and 2023. We understand these as policy instruments which articulate how the government intends to respect its constitutional and legislative obligations via-à-vis the two official languages. They include a vision statement, policy priorities, specific projects, and funding commitments. Two of these were elaborated by Conservative governments (2008-2013 & 2013-2018), whereas three were put forward by Liberal governments (2003-2008, 2018-2023 & 2023-2028). Our analysis identifies the ideological markers that guide and frame each policy instrument. We investigate the relationship between the government and the governed, shifts in the usage of key concepts between documents, and the roles of community-based organizations and provincial governments in the conception and execution of these policy goals. Our analysis innovates in its use of theory, combining works on policy instruments from French/Francophone political sociology and the morphological approach to the study of ideologies from Anglo-American political thought. By combining these two approaches, this project offers greater conceptual clarification of political ideologies and their effects on official languages governance in Canada.

Linguistic minorities are diverse in respect to size and residential patterns geographically. Furthermore, the impact of language-policy measures can be different according to spatiality and rivalry. Using a language on banknotes is non-spatial and non-rival, on street signs it is spatial and non-rival, in home nursing it is spatial and rival, and in individual responses to inquiries in the internet, non-spatial and rival.

Language policy is modeled to have different properties with respect to their importance for the beneficiaries and as far as the implementation costs go, the costs depending both on the number of beneficiaries of the policy as well as on the area of implementation. The geographical distribution of the beneficiaries as well as the size of the relevant jurisdiction influence the impact of different policies.

It is analyzed, how the size of the jurisdictions should be chosen in order to guarantee beneficial minority rights. It is found, among other things, that jurisdictions should be limited in size if planning measures are both spatial and rival; that jurisdictions for important measures should be larger than for less important ones; and that the more extensive rights are, the more efficient they are for geographically concentrated minorities in comparison to uniformly distributed ones.

Keywords: Constitutional economics, diverse minorities, language policy, implementation costs

The paper aims to contribute to developing equitable and effective language policy and planning (LPP). In essence, linguistic justice encompasses both the ethical and pragmatic aspects of linguistic inclusion and the management of linguistic diversity.

First, the paper presents an operational definition of linguistic justice, drawing inspiration from the capability approach. This approach conceives linguistic justice, enabling individuals to engage in as many language-based capabilities as possible. These capabilities encompass various activities and experiences that inherently require language for their realization. The paper applies the Constitutional Approach to select the most relevant language-based capabilities representing fundamental public goods and services. This method of capability selection examines the constitutions of a sample of countries to identify the most critical beings and doings that people have chosen to codify within the document.

Secondly, each identified language-based capability is associated with a statistical indicator and evaluated based on criteria such as data accessibility and computational simplicity. This approach ensures the creation of a practical yet expeditious index for assessment. These indicators are computed for different linguistic groups within a jurisdiction, encompassing both autochthonous and allochthonous minorities, with slight variations in computation to accommodate specific identity claims of autochthonous minorities.

The final result of this process is the Multidimensional Linguistic Justice Index (MLJI), a versatile tool tailored for policymakers, civil servants, and academics. This index aggregates the values of diverse linguistic indicators through the arithmetic mean, yielding a singular numerical representation of linguistic justice for a given jurisdiction. The results from different jurisdictions, or even within the same authority over time, are visually presented through a modified box plot, categorized into four clusters representing different levels of linguistic justice (low, medium-low, medium-high, high). The MLJI is designed for policymakers, civil servants, and academics.