Maxi-Min Language Use A Critical Remark on a Concept by Philippe van Parijs

• Authors: Jan Kruse
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Philippe van Parijs explains in Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World the concept of maxi-min language use as a process of language choice. He suggests that the language chosen as a common language should maximize the minimal competence of a community. Within a multilingual group of people, the chosen language is the language known best by a participant who knows it least. For obvious reasons, only English would qualify for having that status. This article argues that maxi-min is rather a normative concept, not only because the process itself remains empirically unfounded. Moreover, language choice is the result of complex social and psychological structures. As a descriptive process, the maxi-min choice happens in the reality fairly seldom, whereas the max-min use of languages seen as a normative process could be a very effective tool to measure linguistic justice.

Keywords

EN

maxi-min; minimex; linguistic justice; language policy; language choice

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, European and Regional Studies
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 63-70

Dates

published

2016-10-01

online

2016-10-26

Contributors

author

Jan Kruse

• University of Leipzig

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/auseur-2016-0009