Direito à educação linguística de alunos migrantes e refugiados: Reflexões sociopolíticas, sociolinguísticas e educativas em torno dos casos Brasileiro e Alemão

In this contribution, we reflect upon migrants’ right to linguistic education as a specific dimension of their right to education. Based on the Linguistic Human Rights approach (Skutnab-Kangas Phillipson, 1995; also Hamel, 1995; Oliveira, 2003), we will argue that migrant and refugee students should see their right to linguistic education acknowledged in parallel to their right to education. Based on bibliographic and documentary research, we use the deductive and, mainly, the comparative method, in order to analyze the similarities and differences between individuals, phenomena and facts involved. Since the migrant and refugee school population is extremely heterogeneous, from a linguistic and cultural perspective, we will reflect upon concrete language policies and practices that can be developed in the Brazilian and German contexts in order to ensure the right to linguistic education. We argue that the implementation of pluralistic approaches to language learning and teaching might be a pedagogical tool to assure that right.

Linguistic Human Rights in Tibet: Advocacy and Denial

In this article, I describe and analyse how my efforts to advocate for linguistic human rights (LHRs) as an engaged scholar have met with resistance in the form of denial from a variety of sources. By denial, I follow scholars such as Cohen (2001) in referring to not only the refusal to acknowledge certain facts, but also to follow through with appropriate interpretations and implications of those facts. This case study of denial and advocacy is important because it demonstrates a significant and unacknowledged challenge that exists in working for linguistic human rights. My discussion builds on and extends prior work on the challenges faced by advocating for linguistic human rights within academia (May, 2005, 2011; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas & May, 2016). My exploration of denial aims to open up a space for discussing how this challenge may be addressed, and therefore how to more effective advocate for LHRs.

Educating Language Minority Students in South Korea: Multilingual Sustainability and Linguistic Human Rights

In the context of globalization, the landscape of language in Korea has changed dramatically in the last three decades because of the influx of marriage migrants and foreign workers. The growing number of immigrant and international marriages has led to the emergence of new linguistic minorities in Korea who have multicultural and multilingual backgrounds, and they challenge Korea’s long-lasting tradition of linguistic homogeneity and purity. Language related education for this newly emerging group of language minority students, whose number has increased dramatically since the late-1990s, has become a salient issue. This paper critically analyzes the current education policies and programs designed for the newly emerging group of language minority students, and examines the prospects for sustainable development of these students in Korea. In particular, it focuses on the underlying ideology of linguistic nationalism and assimilationist integration regime embedded in various education policy initiatives and reforms, which require language minority students to forgo their multilingual background and forcibly embrace linguistic homogeneity. The paper elaborates on alternative educational programs that could enable language minority students to achieve sustainable development and progress.

Human Rights and Minority Languages: Immigrants’ Perspectives in Greece

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.

Editorial: Deciphering the Double Code of Sustainable Multilingualism

SummaryThe eight-year span in the life of our journal is the time ripe for the in-depth analysis of its development, the results that have been achieved and the prospects that could be projected for the future. Such analysis appears to be even more meaningful in view of the journal’s recent acceptance to Scopus database which opens the way to broader promotion of its scholarship in the matters of multilingualism, plurilingualism, linguistic human rights, language needs, cultural identities and other disputes. Thus, the Editorial of the 16th issue sets out to decipher the double code of ‘sustainable multilingualism’ encrypted in the tile of the journal and the concept itself: from maintaining cultural identities to the global lingua franca, threatening minority languages, from the first steps of the concept in a conference paper of 2004 to the multifaceted approaches elaborated through the topics, research constructs and research interests in the articles published over different epochs of the journal. The Editorial is rounded up by recommendations that will enhance and ensure the further growth of Sustainable Multilingualism.

Sociolinguistic evaluations of inequality

In this new contribution, John Baugh provides an analytical overview of how the field has addressed issues of power and inequality. Baugh addresses how both social hierarchies and the legal system affect the standing of different languages and their users. He then especially focuses on language use in relation to racial and gender dynamics, highlighting influential work that revealed and analyzed how language is used to make and deepen inequality. He concludes with a call for the promotion of “linguistic human rights” that would protect minority language speakers.

Sustainably–Speaking Yoga: Comparing Sanskrit in the 2001 and 2011 Indian Censuses

Sanskrit is considered by many devout Hindus and global consumers of yoga alike to be an inspirational, divine, ‘language of the gods’. For 2000 years, at least, this middle Indo-Aryan language has endured in a post-vernacular state, due, principally, to its symbolic capital as a liturgical language. This presentation focuses on my almost decade-long research into the theo-political implications of reviving Sanskrit, and includes an explication of data derived from fieldwork in ‘Sanskrit-speaking’ communities in India, as well as analyses of the language sections of the 2011 census; these were only released in July 2018. While the census data is unreliable, for many reasons, but due mainly to the fact that the results are self reported, the towns, villages, and districts most enamored by Sanskrit will be shown. The hegemony of the Brahminical orthodoxy quite often obfuscates the structural inequalities inherent in the hierarchical varṇa-jātī system of Hinduism. While the Indian constitution provides the opportunity for groups to speak, read/write, and to teach the language of their choice, even though Sanskrit is afforded status as a scheduled (i.e. recognised language that is offered various state-sponsored benefits) language, the imposition of Sanskrit learning on groups historically excluded from access to the Sanskrit episteme urges us to consider how the issue of linguistic human rights and glottophagy impact on less prestigious and unscheduled languages within India’s complex linguistic ecological area where the state imposes Sanskrit learning. The politics of representation are complicated by the intimate relationship between consumers of global yoga and Hindu supremacy. Global yogis become ensconced in a quite often ahistorical, Sanskrit-inspired thought-world. Through appeals to purity, tradition, affect, and authority, the unique way in which the Indian state reconfigures the logic of neoliberalism is to promote cultural ideals, like Sanskrit and yoga, as two pillars that can possibly create a better world via a moral and cultural renaissance. However, at the core of this political theology is the necessity to speak a ‘pure’ form of Sanskrit. Yet, the Sanskrit spoken today, even with its high and low registers, is, ultimately, various forms of hybrids influenced by the substratum first languages of the speakers. This leads us to appreciate that the socio-political components of reviving Sanskrit are certainly much more complicated than simply getting people to speak, for instance, a Sanskritised register of Hindi.