Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights - Reactions

Reactions

One of the comments made was on the idealistic nature of the Declaration. As the Declaration considers all languages equal, it rejects terms such as ‘official’, ‘regional’ or ‘minority’ languages and strongly advocates the full use of all historic community languages.

Drawing from the articles pertaining to the educational issues (Articles 25, 26 and 30), it is stated that the education system should fully support the development of their community languages and other languages they wish to know in schools to the point of fluency and capability to use it in all social situations. In addition, research on language and culture of language communities is to be done at the university level. It has been argued that the 'rights' stated in those articles will remain the privilege of powerful language communities. The reason is that since the Declaration requires authorities to issue sanctions in the event of violation of the proclaimed rights, doubts have arisen regarding the likelihood of any government adopting the document. Many governmental groups (other than the regional authorities in Spain such as Catalonia, Minorca and Basque) in most countries find it hard to reconcile these fundamental principles of the Declaration with their current language policies and practices. There is a need to balance between regulations imposed by governments and the protection of the rights of the people in different language communities. Considerations such as acknowledging the primary human rights of minority peoples (e.g. issues of physical survival) are, instead, regarded as more dire than an issue like linguistic rights. Linguistic rights will hence be ignored before primary human rights can be properly attended to. Furthermore, the cost involved in executing sanctions is another cause of concern. The main issue, however, is the fact that the article is not legal binding and duty-holders are never specified.

Other responses include the issue that more rights are given to ‘language communities’ in the Declaration. In the context of education, it is observed that other than language communities (equivalent to ‘national territorially based minorities'), those who do not fit under this category will have to ‘assimilate’, as having the right to education in the language of the territory does not necessarily equate to having the right to an education in one’s own language.