Living together as equals: Linguistic justice and sharing the public sphere in multilingual settings

What is it about?

It is usually thought that a shared public sphere is a prerequisite of any democratic regime, where citizens can deliberate and act according to their duty to carry out a just society. This prerequisite, however, can be complicated due to linguistic diversity. Until recently, the literature on linguistic justice has primarily focused on how to achieve just linguistic regimes in compound (i.e. federal) multilingual states, granting some kind of linguistic and political autonomy through the territorial division of the state. But what actually happens inside the territories? This paper deals with linguistic diversity and the establishment and maintenance of a shared public sphere in political communities in which territorial divisions are not possible because the linguistic communities are intermingled. I argue that linguistic justice, with the aim of creating the conditions that maximize the incentives to share the public sphere, would be achieved if, and only if, two principles were reached: (1) the equal recognition of all the host language groups of the political community and (2) the non-segregation of people for reasons of language. Although the relation between the principles can be problematic, I argue that they can be fitted into a linguistic theory of justice named ‘Multilingual Convergence’

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Why is it important?

My arguments try to justify the relevance of some principles in order to achieve just language policies in democratic multilingual societies.