AP/HREQ 3963 3.00
Language, Linguistic Rights, and Human Rights
This course uses a critical human rights approach to explore issues involving the social and cultural impact of language. Students gain the conceptual tools to analyze the relationship between linguistic rights and human rights, and discusses topics such as language and identity, ethnolinguistic nationalism, and the emergence of new languages.
The course explores the centrality of language as element of human nature and culture, and as an expression of identity. Issues surrounding language are particularly important to linguistic minority communities seeking to maintain their distinct group and cultural identity, sometimes under conditions of marginalization, exclusion and discrimination. The course covers linguistic human rights of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It describes the manifestations of language policy at the federal and provincial levels, including its impact on courts and court cases, education and the provision of services generally. It analyses linguistic human rights as a series of obligations on state authorities to either use certain languages in a number of contexts, not interfere with the linguistic choices and expressions of private parties, and the obligation to recognize or support the use of languages of minorities or indigenous peoples. Human rights involving language are a combination of legal requirements based on human rights treaties and guidelines to state authorities on how to address languages or minority issues, and potential impacts associated with linguistic diversity within a state. The course examines contemporary examples of language regulation including Quebec’s official language legislation and its regulation of commercial signs.
Prerequisites: 24 credits.