Language and Minority Rights : Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language

✍ Scribed by Stephen May

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 449
• Edition: 2
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The second edition addresses new theoretical and empirical developments since its initial publication, including the burgeoning influence of globalization and the relentless rise of English as the current world language. May's broad position, however, remains largely unchanged. He argues that the causes of many of the language-based conflicts in the world today still lie with the nation-state and its preoccupation with establishing a 'common' language and culture via mass education. The solution, he suggests, is to rethink nation-states in more culturally and linguistically plural ways while avoiding, at the same time, essentializing the language-identity link. This edition, like the first, adopts a wide interdisciplinary framework, drawing on sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, sociology, political theory, education and law. It also includes new discussions of cosmopolitanism, globalization, the role of English, and language and mobility, highlighting the ongoing difficulties faced by minority language speakers in the world today.

✦ Table of Contents

LANGUAGE AND MINORITY RIGHTS ETHNICITY, NATIONALISM AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
Copyright
Contents
Preface to the second edition
Preface to the first edition
Introduction
Language ecology
The politics of language
The nation-state model
Linguistic human rights
Critical sociolinguistics
Overview
Prospects for change
1 The denunciation of ethnicity
Academic denunciations of ethnicity
Resituating ethnicity in the era of globalization
Ethnicity and modernity
Ethnicity as primordial
Ethnicity as constructed
Ethnicity as intentional
Hybridity: the postmodernist politics of identity
Limits to the social construction of ethnicity
Finding common ground – ethnicity, habitus and field
Ethnies
2 Nationalism and its discontents
Terminology
Linguistic nationalism
The will to nationhood
The modern (nation-)state
The modernists
Limits of the modernist account
Ethno-symbolic accounts of nationalism
Dominant ethnies
The construction of sociological minorities
3 Liberalism and multiculturalism
The pluralist dilemma
Defending liberal democracy
Critiquing liberal democracy
The cosmopolitan alternative
Rethinking liberal democracy
4 Language, identity, rights and representation
Language and identity
Identity in language
Language and culture
Language, culture and politics
Language decline: the death of Irish?
'Resigned language realism’: is language revival just flogging a dead horse?
Re-evaluating language shift
Linguistic markets and symbolic violence
Vive la France: the construction of la langue légitime
Legitimating and institutionalizing minority languages
5 Language, education and minority rights
Educating for the majority
Educating for the minority
Minority group responses to language education policies
Bridging the gap between policy and practice
Minority language and education rights in international law
6 Monolingualism, mobility and the pre-eminence of English
English as global lingua franca
The normative power of monolingualism
The problem with history
The problem with instrumentalism
The problem with bilingual education
‘Doesn’t anyone speak English around here?’ The US ‘English Only’ movement
7 The rise of regionalism: reinstating minority languages
Quebec: safeguarding French in a sea of English
Catalonia: the quest for political and linguistic autonomy
Wales: the development of a bilingual state in a ‘forgotten’ nation
8 Indigenous rights: self-determination, language and education
Indigenous peoples, self-determination and international law
Indigenous peoples and national law
Indigenous language and education rights
Aotearoa/New Zealand: a tale of two ethnicities
9 Reimagining the nation-state
Addressing constructionism
Tolerability and the crux of majority opinion
Polyethnic language and education rights
The challenge of multiculturalism
Toward a more pluralist conception of language rights
Notes
Bibliography
Index