AMUR Angular :: Browsing by Author "Tonkin, Humphrey"

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Language Rights and Linguistic Justice
(Wydawnictwo Rys, 2011) Tonkin, Humphrey
The status of human rights took a new turn with the adoption of the United Nations Charter in 1945 and the approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Up until that point, human rights had been regarded as essentially elements in the constitutional law of individual states; they now became universalized as principles of international law. But non-discrimination with regard to language received relatively little attention in either document, in part because of a reluctance to regard language rights as not only individual but also collective. Given its role as a means of communication, language carries with it a collec- tive sense that is less inherent in non-discrimination on grounds of race, gender or religion, and it has long been associated with the problem of minority rights, an issue entirely avoided by the drafters of the Universal Declaration. Today language rights are recognized in many different ways by individual states, some strongly supportive and some less so. Increasingly, non-discrimination on grounds of language is becoming an international issue as cross-border language flows affect the ways languages are used in individual states.