Language
Principles for the Linguistic Future of Europe
Philippe Van Parijs on Justice, Fairness and Respect among Languages
Europe is a continent where more than 300 languages are in use. Its language situation is nothing if not complicated. The 23 national languages of the EU member states have been recognized as official languages of the Union. A further 40 are recognized by the Council of Europe under its Charter for Regional Minority Languages. Another 120 languages - ranging from Alderney French, Basque and Breton to Welsh, West Flemish, West Frisian, Yiddish, Yurt Tatar and Zenatiya - are listed in the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages (2010) as ‘endangered’. In recent decades large numbers of immigrant languages have arrived and established themselves: London alone has over 300 immigrant languages in its schools, and so has Barcelona; but these immigrant languages, which range from Arabic, Berber/Tamazight and Bengali/Sylheti through Chinese, Kurdish and Lingala to Turkish, have no status of any kind. And everywhere today, alongside all the languages mentioned, we find English as the global lingua franca and the ever more common vehicle for communication across language barriers.
The complexity becomes even greater when we note the many competing views in the European-wide debate on this issue - not just those of political economists (De Swaan, Grin), but also of writers and intellectuals (Amin Maalouf, Devoldere), human rights advocates and educationalists (Skuttnab-Kangas), UNESCO specialists in language endangerment (Harrison, Moseley), language policy analysts (Spolsky) and historians of the linguistic legacy of colonialism and imperialism (Calvet, Ostler).
And actually, when we ask how Europe handles all this diversity and multilingualism, the fact is that the EU constitution officially acknowledges only two basic principles: on the one hand it recognizes linguistic diversity as one of the cornerstones of European civilization, while on the other it bans language discrimination. That is to say, in actual practice linguistic policy-making often amounts to an agreement to disagree, or simply embodies the lowest common denominator across the European political spectrum - between, for example, on the one hand France's constitutional monopoly on the French language (a model also followed by Greece and by Belgium, where the use of the three national languages is linked to territories), and on the other the more pluralistic practice in countries like Spain, the Netherlands and Britain, where at least the traditional indigenous linguistic minorities have been granted some degree of language rights and protection.
Understandably, therefore, people often regard European multilingualism as an issue of power, of might is right. Not so Van Parijs. It is not that he denies these power-political realities or the existing inequalities in the field of languages. On the contrary, he is very well aware of them, and his starting point is actually the unjustness of it all. Global democracy, issues of social and economic justice, and the need for a basic income have long been central themes in his work as a philosopher at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL in Louvain-la-Neuve), where he holds the Hoover chair of economic and social ethics, while at the same time he also has long-standing connections with Oxford and its Political Theory project. Consequently, it now comes naturally to him to address the inequalities that exist in the field of languages, and to ask: What can we do about this, from the perspective of a general theory of justice? And what should we do to reduce the injustices we encounter in this domain?
Here, right at the outset, one might object: but is this actually a feasible prospect? After all, in the real world in which we are living, the free play of market forces can only exacerbate existing inequalities between people, including inequalities of language. So what about justice, fairness and equality - how could these ever be applied to the domain of language?