This article provides an overview of the current issues and challenges facing the nascent paradigm of minority language rights (MLR). It focuses on the theoretical points of dispute and tension with respect to MLR, as well as the challenges attendant upon their implementation in complex, multiethnic and multilingual contexts. The article acknowledges, but also responds to, key critiques of MLR to date. These include debates about linguistic modernisation, linguistic identities and essentialism, language and social mobility, and macro and micro language practices. In light of these debates, the article speculates about possible ways forward for the MLR paradigm.
While advocacy of minority language rights (MLR) has become well established in sociolinguistics, language policy and planning and the wider human rights literature, it has also come under increased criticism in recent times for a number of key limitations. In this paper, I address directly three current key criticisms of the MLR movement. The first is a perceived tendency towards essentialism in articulations of language rights. The second is the apparent utopianism and artificiality of 'reversing language shift' in the face of wider social and political 'realities'. And the third is that the individual mobility of minority-language speakers is far better served by shifting to a majority language. While acknowledging the perspicacity of some of these arguments, I aim to rearticulate a defence of minority language rights that effectively addresses these key concerns. This requires, however, a sociohistorical/sociopolitical rather than a biological/ecological analysis of MLR. In addition, I will argue that a sociohistorical/sociopolitical defence of MLR can problematise the positions often adopted by minority language rights' critics themselves, particularly those who defend majoritarian forms of linguistic essentialism and those who sever the instrumental/identity aspects of language. Implications for language policy and planning will also be discussed.
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