Linguistic Justice and English as a Lingua Franca from a Minority Perspective

• Authors: Zsombor Csata
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The article is a brief evaluation of the regulatory environment of language use in Transylvania, Romania based on Van Parijs’ conceptual toolkit presented in his 2011 book Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World. This linguistic regime is a coercive hybrid regulation containing elements stemming from both the categorical regime (personality principle) and territoriality. In municipalities or counties where the official use of minority languages is permitted, it is typically present in a conjunctive manner, but its enforcement is weak and inconsistent. The principle of territorially coercive linguistic subdivision – proposed by Van Parijs as an optimal solution for a greater linguistic justice – is not accommodated in any of the fields of official communication and under present political circumstances it has no further plausibility. A hypothetical alternative for the territorially coercive regime would be the introduction of English as a lingua franca in interethnic communication. We argued that this latter option would be fair only if English could entirely replace the official languages currently in use or it would receive a fully equivalent status at least in those regions where a considerable number of linguistic minorities live.

Keywords

EN

multilingualism; language policies; Hungarians in Romania; English as a lingua franca

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, European and Regional Studies
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 83-93

Dates

published

2016-10-01

online

2016-10-26

Contributors

author

Zsombor Csata

• Babeş–Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/auseur-2016-0012