What is it about?

Linguistic human rights refer to the fundamental rights protecting language-related acts and values that are entrenched in the constitution of a country or in an international treaty. Linguistic human rights encompass a series of core rights (e.g. the right to speak one’s language) and ancillary rights (e.g. the right to a translation or an interpretation from other languages and the right to learn the language).

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Why is it important?

This handbook sheds light on the lesser-investigated linguistic human rights of the Indigenous/Tribal people(s), Minorities and minoritised people(s), in particular their language rights to exercise their language rights. The minority languages covered by the book include but are not limited to the Mixe language, Celtic language, Australian First Nations languages, and Inuit languages.

Perspectives

One sure strength of this rich and thorough volume is its diversity of people (e.g. scholars, educators, NGO officers, editors, rights activists, lawyers, tribal members, electrical and optical engineers), place (e.g. Austria, Finland, Iceland, Nepal, Myanmar, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Canada, France, Belgium, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, Haiti, Indonesia), and policy areas (e.g. linguistic minority rights, endangered languages, sociolinguistics, law, language legislation and policy, policy intervention, remote, rural, and urban development, system-wide assessment, teacher education, longitudinal action research, multilingual pedagogies, translation and trans-knowledging, psycho-emotional support, and bilingual and plurilingual education).

Ran Yi
UNSW Sydney

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights, edited by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, July 2023, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15718115-bja10119.
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