Challenges of Linguistic Human Rights in Relation to Language Education

Linguistic human rights (LHRs) envelop many questions and ambiguous areas of language pedagogy and sociolinguistics. Difficulties arise as one must understand, due to the demands of linguistic rights, what treatment is owed to whom while balancing the sensitivities of a culture and the linguistic demands of individuals. Further, linguistic concerns themselves are highly complex, as one language may be endangered while another is privileged—complicating LHRs as one navigates the many interests and differences found in language use and acquisition in any given culture or community. Through secondary research, this paper will work toward identifying the difficulties they face, in part by looking at historical developments of LHRs and language education in the West. This secondary research primarily focused on peer-review publications within the last ten years, with key terms including “linguistic human rights,” “language rights,” “culture and language,” and “bilingualism and court decisions.” This approach to linguistic human rights will help reveal the differences in value individuals hold toward language education depending on various factors (e.g., immigration, political conflict, cultural identity) and the interplay between linguistic rights and language education. Additionally, it is through this approach that one sees the variety of responses and proposed solutions to the issues surrounding LHRs, but disagreement on how best to address the issue of LHRs remains. Ultimately, both researchers and instructors would benefit from being aware of linguistic human rights and historical interactions between cultures and language rights, as both shape the education—and therefore the lives—of students.