ABSTRACT

Many liberal democratic societies have adopted laws aiming to protect languages. These laws aid the survival not only of minority groups within a particular state, but also of the majority culture, perhaps because they see themselves as cultural minorities in a larger polity or global community. One example is Quebec’s Charter of the French Language, which limits commercial signage in English, and requires everyone except Anglophones to be educated in French. France and Israel have adopted laws limiting the amount of English-language programming permitted on radio and television, so as to encourage increased usage of their national languages.

This paper focuses on the justifications and challenges for such laws arising from the effects of globalization on people’s choices of language and culture. Specifically, I defend the protection of minority languages on the ground that it offsets the unfair effects of economic globalization, which is causing the global predominance of English. According to this approach, laws protecting minority languages diminishes pressures on speakers of minority languages to assimilate into the majority culture as a condition of their full economic and political participation in the society. On the other hand, a major challenge to such laws is that, in requiring the use of particular languages, they prevent people from choosing new cultures and identities, which is a welcome consequence of economic globalization.

This paper articulates a moral justification for laws aimed at aiding the survival of languages that are dying out due to increasing rates of assimilation into globally dominant or majority languages, and defends them against the challenge identified above. Language can be said to be part of culture and vice versa, but this paper identifies the specific properties of language that justify its treatment as a distinct good in which humans have a strong moral interest. I argue that giving up one’s mother tongue is an unfair price to pay for full economic and political participation in a modern liberal society. Asking people to choose between their language and economic advancement demands that they choose between incommensurable goods. I then argue that a legitimate goal of liberal societies is to mitigate the incompatibility of incommensurable valuable goods, as is demonstrated by constant attempt to balance liberty and equality in a way that maximizes each value.