Fairness, rights, and language rights: On the fair treatment of linguistic minorities

Abstract

There exists a considerable literature analyzing language rights. The concept, however, is not very well defined and covers everything from the rights of immigrants to keep their language or its opposite, their right to be rapidly integrated into a new culture, over the rights of national minorities to preserve their ancestral language to issues of status planning in nations, region or international bodies.56 In this essay, we limit the scope to a rather narrow issue. We look at the formal rights to use a certain language in a certain domain. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.