Language Policy and Political Theory

Abstract

The relationship between language policy and political theory is an important, if underdeveloped, one. It is important because political theory provides a crucial lens for the examination of the wider sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts within which language policy is inevitably situated. The principal focus of political theory has been on rights attributable to citizens, particularly within modern nation-states. In orthodox liberal accounts, individual and universal “citizenship” rights are championed over collective or group-based rights. In other words, both citizenship and human rights are viewed only as individual rights, and thus one's particular cultural and linguistic (group) background, and its significance, is deemed irrelevant. The ascendancy of orthodox liberalism thus means that most political theorists are skeptical about, and at times outright hostile toward, any notion of language rights, which are deemed to be group-based rather than individual rights.

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