Human Rights and Minority Languages: Immigrants’ Perspectives in Greece

Abstract

Human rights and their fortification through conventions and treaties are thought to be one of the greatest achievements of the previous century. A very important category of human rights is the Linguistic Human Rights (LHR). Linguistic Human Rights are connected to basic human rights and are of great importance in policy and planning. There have been numerous researches on language policies and in educational systems around the world. However, minority populations’ opinion, for example refugees’ opinion, is rarely represented in these researches. The present research aims at exploring the existing language policies in Greece in reference to minority languages. For the needs of this research six adult refugees participated in short semi-structured interviews. Even though participants seemed to be unaware of the term “Linguistic Human Rights”, most of them referred to the difficulty they have in exercising major human rights due to the monolingual policies that are followed in Greece. Taking into consideration the importance of Linguistic Human Rights and people’s need to use their mother language(s) in Greece, the last part of this research includes suggestions and ideas towards multilingual practices that come from different countries around the world.