More than 40 percent of the world’s estimated 7,100+ languages are in danger of disappearing by the end of this century. As with the decline of biodiversity, language loss has been attributed to environmental degradation, developmentalism, and the destruction of Indigenous communities. This book brings together leading experts and younger scholars across the humanities and social sciences to investigate what global language justice looks like in a time of climate crisis. Examining the worldwide loss of linguistic diversity, they develop a new conception of justice to safeguard marginalized languages. Global Language Justice explores the socioeconomic transformations that both accelerate the decline of minoritized languages and give rise to new possibilities through population movement, unexpected encounters, and technological change. It also critically examines the concepts that are typically deployed to defend linguistic diversity, including human rights, inclusiveness, and equality. Contributors take up topics such as mapping language communities in New York City or how Indigenous innovation challenges notions of linguistic purity. They demonstrate the need to reckon with linguistic diversity in order to achieve a sustainable global economic system and show how the concept of digital vitality can push language justice in new directions. Interspersed with their essays are multilingual works by world-renowned poets and artists that engage with and deepen the book’s themes. Integrating ambitious theoretical exploration with concrete solutions, Global Language Justice offers vital new perspectives on the place of linguistic diversity in ongoing ecological crises.

Language policies are increasingly acknowledged as being a necessary component of many decisions taken in the areas of the labor market, education, minority languages, mobility, and social inclusion of migrants. They can affect the democratic control of political organizations, and they can either entrench or reduce inequalities. These are the central topics of this book. Economists, philosophers, political scientists, and sociolinguists discuss – from an interdisciplinary perspective – the distributive socio-economic effects of language policies, their impact on justice and inequality at the national or international level, as well as the connection between language choices and an inclusive access to public services. The range of social and economic issues raised by linguistic diversity in contemporary societies is large, and this requires new approaches to tackle them. This book provides new input to design better, more efficient, and fair language policies in order to manage linguistic diversity in different areas. Topics covered include: theoretical models of linguistic justice and linguistic disadvantage; the assessment of the socio-economic consequences of language policies; the evaluation of the costs, benefits, and degree of inclusion of language planning measures; the politics of migrants’ linguistic integration; as well as multilingualism and economic activities. These topics are discussed in different contexts, including the areas inhabited by linguistic minorities, cities receiving migrants, and supranational organizations.

This book showcases pedagogical tools for learning languages through interdisciplinary project-based learning (PBL). Chapters demonstrate a diverse range of PBL activities that help students build communities of practice within classroom settings, and across local and global communities. Too often, learning a language can become a static endeavor, confined to a classroom and a singular discipline. But language is dynamic and fluid no matter the setting in which learning takes place. In acknowledging this, this volume explores how PBL and community-engagement pedagogies serve to combine learning goals and community service in ways that enhance student growth and facilitate second language development in an interdisciplinary, multilingual, and multicultural higher education learning environment. Chapters touch on activities and approaches including spoken-word poetry, environmental projects, social activism, study abroad, and in-service learning. This book will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of language education, second language acquisition, higher education, and comparative and international education.

Language, whether spoken, written, or signed, is a powerful resource that is used to facilitate social justice or undermine it. The first reference resource to use an explicitly global lens to explore the interface between language and social justice, this volume expands our understanding of how language symbolizes, frames, and expresses political, economic, and psychic problems in society, thus contributing to visions for social justice. Investigating specific case studies in which language is used to instantiate and/or challenge social injustices, each chapter provides a unique perspective on how language carries value and enacts power by presenting the historical contexts and ethnographic background for understanding how language engenders and/or negotiates specific social justice issues. Case studies are drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America and the Pacific Islands, with leading experts tackling a broad range of themes, such as equality, sovereignty, communal well-being, and the recognition of complex intersectional identities and relationships within and beyond the human world. Putting issues of language and social justice on a global stage and casting light on these processes in communities increasingly impacted by ongoing colonial, neoliberal, and neofascist forms of globalization, Language and Social Justice is an essential resource for anyone interested in this area of research.

In Europe and throughout the world, competence in English is spreading at a speed never achieved by any language in human history. This apparently irresistible growing dominance of English is frequently perceived and sometimes indignantly denounced as being grossly unjust. Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World starts off arguing that the dissemination of competence in a common lingua franca is a process to be welcomed and accelerated, most fundamentally because it provides the struggle for greater justice in Europe and in the world with an essential weapon: a cheap medium of communication and of mobilization. However, the resulting linguistic situation can plausibly be regarded as unjust in three distinct senses. Firstly, the adoption of one natural language as the lingua franca implies that its native speakers are getting a free ride by benefiting costlessly from the learning effort of others. Secondly, they gain greater opportunities as a result of competence in their native language becoming a more valuable asset. And thirdly the privilege systematically given to one language fails to show equal respect for the various languages with which different portions of the population concerned identify. The book spells out the corresponding interpretations of linguistic justice as cooperative justice, distributive justice and parity of esteem, respectively. And it discusses systematically a wide range of policies that might help achieve linguistic justice in these three senses, from a linguistic tax on Anglophone countries to the banning of dubbing or the linguistic territoriality principle. Against this background, the book argues that linguistic diversity is not valuable in itself but it will nonetheless need to be protected as a by-product of the pursuit of linguistic justice as parity of esteem.

This book discusses how digital inequalities today may lead to other types of inequalities in the Global South. Contributions to this collection move past discussing an access problem – a binary division between ‘haves and have-nots’ – to analyse complex inequalities in the internet use, benefits, and opportunities of people in the Global South region. Using specific case studies, this book underlines how communities in the Global South are now attempting to participate in the information age despite high costs, a lack of infrastructure, and more barriers to entry. Contributions discuss the recent changes in the Global South. These changes include greater technological availability, the spread of digital literacy programs and computer courses, and the overall growth in engagement of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and languages in digital environments. This book outlines and evaluates the role of state and public institutions in facilitating these changes and consequently bridging the digital divide.

A profound offering and call to action—collective stories, testimonials, and incantations for renewing political and spiritual liberation grounded in Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Queer and Trans healing justice lineages We reclaim the power, resilience, and innovation of our ancestors through this book. To embody their wisdom across centuries and generations is to continue their legacy of liberation and healing. In this anthology, Black Queer Feminist editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland guide readers through the history, legacies, and liberatory practices of healing justice—a political strategy of collective care and safety that intervenes on generational trauma from systemic violence and oppression. They call forth the ancestral medicines and healing practices that have sustained communities who have survived genocide and oppression, while radically imagining what comes next. Anti-capitalist, Black feminist, and abolitionist, Healing Justice Lineages is a profound and urgent call to embrace community and survivor-led care strategies as models that push beyond commodified self-care, the policing of the medical industrial complex, and the surveillance of the public health system. Centering disability, reproductive, environmental, and transformative justice and harm reduction, this collection elevates and archives an ongoing tradition of liberation and survival—one that has been largely left out of our history books, but continues to this day. In the first section, “Past: Reckoning with Roots and Lineage,” Page and Woodland remember and reclaim generations-long healing justice and community care work, asking critical questions like: How did our ancestors transform trauma and violence in their liberation work? What were our ancestors reckoning with—and what did they imagine? The next sections, “Origins of Healing Justice” and “Alchemy: Theory + Praxis,” explore regional stories of healing justice in response to the current political and cultural landscape. The last section, “Political + Spiritual Imperatives for the Future,” imagines a future rooted in lessons of the past; addresses the ways healing justice is being co-opted and commodified; and uplifts emergent work that’s building infrastructure for care, safety, healing, and political liberation.

This collection explores the relationships between acts of translation and the movement of peoples across linguistic, cultural, and physical borders, centering the voices of migrant writers and translators in literatures and language cultures of the Global South. To offer a counterpoint to existing scholarship, this book examines translation practices as forms of both home-building and un-homing for communities in migration. Drawing on scholarship from translation studies as well as eco-criticism, decolonial thought, and gender studies, the book’s three parts critically reflect on different dimensions of the intersection of translation and migration in a diverse range of literary genres and media. Part I looks at self-translation, collaboration, and cocreation as modes of expression born out of displacement and exile. Part II considers radical strategies of literary translation and the threats and opportunities they bring in situations of detention and border policing. Part III looks ahead to the ways in which translation can act as a powerful means of fostering responsibility, solidarity, and community in building an inclusive, multilingual public sphere even in the face of climate crisis. This dynamic volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies, migration and mobility studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature.

Globalization and migration are producing societies of increasing linguistic diversity. At the same time, English is achieving unprecedented global dominance, smaller languages are becoming 'extinct' at an alarming rate, and ethnic tensions in countries from Belgium to Tibet continue to centre on questions of language. Against this background, the issue of how to ensure justice between speakers of different languages becomes a pressing social concern. Matters of 'linguistic justice' are therefore drawing increasing scholarly attention across a range of disciplines. How does international law contribute to linguistic justice? This book explores that question by conducting a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of international law on language, analysing the many disparate fields of international law which affect language use both directly (human rights, cultural heritage laws, and EU legislation, for example) and indirectly (international trade law and international labour standards, among others). Moving beyond the technical analysis of legal provisions, the book explores the conceptual framework which underpins international law on language, unearthing underlying assumptions and ideas about what constitutes a 'just' language policy from a legal perspective. In doing so, the book draws on the methodology of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose ideas of 'habitus' and 'field' offer a way of understanding the changing significance of language to human identity, and the way in which language becomes a focal point for the exercise of social power. This analysis reveals the limitations of contemporary international law on language, and charts a course towards the achievement of greater 'linguistic justice'.

This edited book presents case-studies and reflections on the role of languages and their analytic study in development practices across four regions: Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific. The authors highlight the importance of conceptual studies of languages and cultures, as well as language choice, for enhancing development practices, demonstrating the value that language analysis and the humanities can add to the already multi-disciplinary field of Development Studies. The chapters draw on the fields of linguistics, human geography, education, diverse economies, community learning, sociology, and anthropology, and topics covered include some significant areas of interest to sustainable human development: education, work, finances, age, gender; as well as a key approach to development (asset-based community development). Chapters on informal adult learning provide opportunities to explore how and why language and linguistic analysis is relevant to development projects. The volume aims to promote collaboration and interdisciplinary dialogue and should be of interest to academics, practitioners and students of language and development, and to those working in the field of development globally.