Educational materials © for/by Peter L. Patrick. May contain copyright material used for educational purposes. Please respect copyright.
Linguistic Human Rights:
A Sociolinguistic
Introduction
Dept. of Language & Linguistics
University of Essex
(What) Can Linguistics Contribute to Human
Rights?
LHR does not at first blush appear to
be the most pressing area of human rights to think about. One reason could be
that there are a number of urgent and dramatic areas for which it’s hard to
think of any contribution linguistics has made. Such topics as
o voting
rights,
o legal
status of aboriginal peoples’ land claims,
o freedom
of speech
o equality
for women’s work, and
o refugee
& asylum issues
seem
like examples of this. At some point in each issue, language (or a language) is
certainly relevant, but it’s not (yet, or not always) obvious what linguistics
as a discipline has to usefully say.
·
(Things change
fast. Within a year after I wrote this, I became aware that there was a recent
and dramatic rise in the number of linguists - and other so-called language experts!
- who are asked for expert opinions concerning the
last point. For more on refugee/asylum issues, see here.)
On the other hand, there is a
considerable body of work on, e.g.,
o discourse
analysis of political rhetoric,
o threats
to and extinction of indigenous languages,
o language
choice and repression in public activities,
o how
language constructs and reinforces gender ideologies, and
o the
complex relations between language socialization, linguistic competence, and
ethnic group membership,
which
might easily be made relevant to the preceding issues at several levels – if
only enough people who know about the latter set to work together with experts
in the former.
One possible way – there are, no doubt, many! – to organise some of these interrelations, is to draw on
sociolinguistic typology. In what ways can we characterise societies through
their languages, and what sorts of human rights problems characteristically
arise in these different categories? I give a brief exploration of one such
taxonomy here.
Linguistic Human
Rights homepage
- Peter L Patrick
homepage
Last revised 2 November
2005