Ling A: Language and Ethnolinguistic Political Conflict

Linguistic minorities arise through conquest, colonization, immigration, enslavement, or the creation of political states that ignore ethnolinguistic territories, and the creation of linguistic minorities often leads to ethnolinguistic conflict. These conflicts often involve assaults on minority language rights, and while they account for a good portion of global conflict, they tend to attract less attention and be less acknowledged as a “class”, than ideological, religious, environmental, or economically based conflict. The publication of Language Conflict and Language Rights: Ethnolinguistic Perspectives on Human Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2018) opened the door to a closer examination of ethnolinguistic conflicts and language rights violations around the world. This course will first present an overview of linguistic identity, and an introduction to theories of ethnic conflict. Following this, we will introduce a typology of language conflict/rights cases, surveying the historical and linguistic backgrounds for several of these, along with an account of the language rights violations that have played out in each. The course will next survey language conflict historically, present on the topic of language rights and linguistic accommodations, and lastly take up a discussion of language endangerment, extinction, and revival.