Language justice in Europe and around the world

The realization of these demands for justice at the linguistic level leads Philippe Van Parijs to take a clear-cut stance. Faced with the massive spread of English and the domination of its use, we must, in his view, not "regret or resist" but "rejoice and accelerate". In response to legitimate misgivings about the spread of English, he put forward a number of reasons in the lecture and discussion. Against the objection of an ideological dimension inherent in the domination of English, he replied that the existence of negation in a language is sufficient to guarantee the possibility of criticizing or contesting. From then on, mastery of English becomes a matter of assertion, with the denunciation of injustice having to seize the "megaphone" of the new lingua franca and not "whisper" in a national language. Finally, the cost of learning English ceases to be an obstacle as the opportunities and motivation to learn it increase. This is illustrated by the example of a small linguistic community: with limited resources, it will encourage the subtitling of films rather than their dubbing, which, by promoting the assimilation of English, helps to reduce the costs of learning it. These costs are largely offset by the fact that, the smaller the community, the more it benefits from increased opportunities for exchange and influence.

On the basis of these reasons, we can convince ourselves that linguistic injustice can be corrected within one or two generations by the widespread bilingualism of non-English speakers. But the argument clearly covers only part of the justice requirement: if bilingualism does not thwart (or even guarantee) the expression of competing conceptions of the good life, global equality of opportunity and the optimization of freedoms, it does so at the expense of other languages. In this respect, linguistic competence is a very special resource. In the case of any other resource, its allocation in accordance with the maximin principle is sufficient to meet the requirements of the liberal and egalitarian justice defined by Philippe Van Parijs. Linguistic justice", however, undermines the certainty that justice is limited to its distributive dimension. In his lecture, Philippe Van Parijs explained that his reflection on the spread of English as a global lingua franca had led him to include in his conception of justice a constraint of equity (or equal dignity) that had previously seemed superfluous. Unlike material disadvantages, which can be gradually compensated for, this constraint requires coercive measures aimed at imposing the use of vernacular languages for certain public acts (administration, justice, lectures, etc.) or symbolic acts (see the communication of European bodies, for example).

Such a principle of linguistic territoriality aims to correct the effects of a "linguistic justice" essentially achieved on the basis of the imposition of English as the global lingua franca. But it does not solve all the problems. Two in particular emerged during the lecture. Firstly, this principle is not sufficient to halt the disappearance of many of the 6,000 languages that still exist. According to Philippe Van Parijs, "the languages that survive are the ones that take over a territory". The local example of Belgium shows that the path of linguistic federalism is not easily practicable, even though it would be necessary to preserve a maximum number of languages, given the limited number of states in the world. If "getting your hands on a territory" becomes an issue of linguistic justice at the global level, then this seems likely to take a conflictual turn. Nor does the principle of linguistic territoriality resolve the question of the comparative advantage of English-speaking countries, which will not require mastery of a language other than English in order to settle there. And some countries, particularly those with marginal languages, will be forced to depart from this principle and forgo protecting their language locally in order to retain their attractiveness to the most qualified workers.

This conference has shown that "language justice" calls for a complex response. Philippe Van Parijs is preparing a book on this subject, to be published in 2010(Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World, Oxford University Press).