The language of rights as identified by Mills (2002) involves the manner in which language is approached today. Policy documents, as well as various academic literature, put language rights at the heart of their analysis. Language right-based policies are displacing traditional language planning while sociolinguistics studies have become studies of language rights. Language rights are additionally discussed as human rights, inspired by the remarkable expansion of international human rights advocacy over the last couple of years. Human rights have been looked to as values of ‘godless’ or post-political age (Klug, 2000). In recent decades, radicals and reforms have turned to the law to address the spectrum of social concerns, disappointed with the inability of politics and economical to change societies globally. This, in turn, resulted in law contracts with earlier left wing skepticism towards law, which highlighted undemocratic legal power, legal abuses and miscarriage of justice. International law is particularly associated by human rights advocates, with non-violence and international politics with war and state violence (Meyerhoff, 2006). Significant anthropology influential in language advocacy revised its historical opposition to international human rights and currently commonly promotes indigenous human rights and language rights.
A broad shift to approaching language rights as the international human right is clear from 1990. Existing documents such as International convention on civil and political rights were provided with a wider scope (Wright, 1998). New documents were codified such as the UN Deceleration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities 1992 and European Carter for Regional or Minority Languages. Commentaries on international linguistic human rights and comparative studies of national language rights have mushroomed over the last two decades. Initiatives seek to expand existing linguistic human rights, whether through drafting new documents such as the Universal Declaration of Linguistics rights presented to existing provisions.
Adaptation of international human rights approach to language problems is seen as more radical than the traditional language planning approaches because it recognizes problems of power ad powerlessness and seeks to empower language minority communities, not simply treating them as service recipients (Smitherman, 1997). Concerns are repeatedly expressed that existing international human rights instruments are inadequate or treated as a soft law and not enforceable. Efforts to address linguistic is human rights governance emancipator. Linguistic human rights advocacy is commonly skeptical towards prescriptive grammar, but it is proposed rights governance is highly prescriptive.
Early rights movements emphasized on defending civil and political rights, freedoms of speech and association. However, contemporary human approaches codifying more and more concern as universal fundamental rights beyond politics have anti-democratic implications. Politics is ideally the spheres where one comes together to speak reason with fellow citizens as peers. Expanding human rights governance, codifying particular social justice models as formal mandatory norms circumscribes politics. Simultaneously, the public exercise of speech and association is undermined. To put speech ‘at stake’ and marginalize the polis s further to jeopardize individuals subjectivity as ‘zoon poltikon’ and ‘zoon logon ekhon’ – a living being capable of speech (Smorti & Fioretti, 2014). Equally, expanding human rights governance delegitimizes alternative political vision and societies failing to follow the globally codifying norms. Thus, linguistic human rights advocacy strategies, expanding laws empire have implications for civil and political freedoms, notwithstanding the attractive language of rights empowerment and identity recognition.
The terms language rights and linguistic rights may, therefore, denote different sources if law, although the strict demarcation of terms is not maintained in the literature and will not be there. The distinction between national and international rights is significant but is often blurred, especially in the writing on language rights policies (Smitherman, 1997). Increasingly, language policy literature shares the perspective of linguistic human rights literature, conceptualizes national language rights as deriving from international human rights obligations, and formulates language rights as supranational rights.
Taking this into consideration, the days when states prohibited people from using a language other than the official one especially in the private sphere ought to be a thing of the past now. Individual and collective language rights allow, with ought exception, citizens of both genders to use the language of their choice not only in the private sphere but also in public. No matter whether it be a majority or a minority language, colloquial language or an artificial language, a lingual franca or a ‘secret language’ (Tannen, 2003). It is illegal to ban the Kurdish language in Turkey; nobody is entitled to command others to speak only German in German school playground.
The issue then is not much one of imposing prohibitions on languages but, above all, of discrimination against others because of the language they use. This is, unfortunately, an everyday problem: at school, in public administrations at the workplace, and during leisure time. Although discrimination is related to membership of ethnic groups and or religion, language is frequently a touchstone for discrimination. A person’s dignity, as the basis of their personality rights to use their language, suffers more than anything else from the various forms of language discrimination applied in daily life.
As far as language use is concerned, it is not only the language use of citizens that is at issue, but also that used in institutions. In state establishments, language use is based on the official language or languages. Citizens who have no command of such as language are entitled to translation (Zeigler & Osinubi, 2002). The right has become accepted, starting with criminal justice, despite the fact that its applications create considerable problems in many countries. In the educational system, there is the official teaching language, and language acquisition there takes place not only in the language classes but all other lessons as well, and informally everywhere.
Language acquisition is still the domain if the media, especially, the audio-visual media. Since the print media organized on the basis of civil law and the market choice the languages that are to be used. The same applies t o private audio-visual media. The situation is difficult with individual audio media. Governments are still tempted to attach preference to national language in the public even in cases in which the various constitutions and laws prohibited such a practice. If one grasp language rights primarily as individuals personality rights, the individual use of languages such as the viewing and listening figures would have decided the way in which the language used in the public media develops.
In conclusion, rights associated with language are given powerful legal protection. This is of course always possible there are no restrictions and sanctions on the use of any language. However, the decisions to use or avoid using any given language depend on many situations, cognitive and affective factors. Irrespective of one's geographical position, much the same way as traditional human rights, everyone can use the language they intend to despite their geographical location.
References
Meyerhoff, M. (2006). Introduction to sociolinguistics. NY: Routledge.
Mills, S. (2002). Rethinking politeness, impoliteness and gender identity.Gender identity and discourse analysis, 69-90.
Kulick, D. (2000). Gay and lesbian language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 243-285.
Smitherman, G. (1997). “The Chain Remain the Same” Communicative Practices in the Hip Hop Nation. Journal of Black Studies, 28(1), 3-25.
Smorti, A., & Fioretti, C. (2014). Bringing the doctor inside the care: the use of stories in doctor-patient communication. Journal of comparative research in Anthropology and Sociology, 5(1), 117.
Tamura, E. H. (2002). African American vernacular English and Hawai'i Creole English: A comparison of two school board controversies. journal of Negro Education, 17-30.
Tannen, D. (2003). Power maneuvers or connection maneuvers? Ventriloquizing in family interaction. Linguistics, language, and the real world: Discourse and beyond, 50-62.
Zeigler, M. B., & Osinubi, V. (2002). Theorizing the Postcoloniality of African American English. Journal of Black Studies, 588-609.
Wright, R. L. (1998). Sociolinguistic and ideological dynamics of the Ebonics controversy. Journal of Negro Education, 5-15.
