Volume: 28  Number: 4  Page: 325–338  doi:10.2167/jmmd492.0

Linguistic Human Rights and Mobility

Lionel Wee Department of English Language ' Literature, Faculty of Arts ' Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore

The Linguistic Human Rights (LHRs) paradigm is motivated by the desire to combat linguistic discrimination, where speakers of discriminated languages find themselves unable to use their preferred language in society at large. However, in an increasingly globalised world where speakers may feel the need or the desire to travel across state boundaries, there is a question about the transposability of LHRs. This paper first considers the human rights discourse, and shows that problems in this discourse are inherited by and exacerbated in the LHRs paradigm, in no small part because its conception of language draws on an ideology of monolingualism. But since a world of mobile humans is one that is fundamentally plurilingual, what is therefore needed is a greater emphasis on the notion of a social language, which provides a more robust understanding of the nature of language, especially in a world where people tend to move around a lot.

Keywords: asylum seekers, globalisation, language rights, Singlish, social language

© 2007 L. Wee

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