Liberal Neutrality and Language Policy

If there is one point that the critics of liberalism almost all agree upon, it is that liberal neutrality is an unappealing and perhaps incoherent doctrine. Many contemporary liberals do not endorse the idea of neutrality, and even liberals most identified with the idea, John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, have backed off it in certain respects. ¹ In thinking about the challenges posed by cultural and linguistic diversity, the idea of neutrality seems especially unpromising. Nobody has made this point as clearly or forcefully as Will Kymlicka. "The idea that government could be neutral with respect to ethnic and national groups," he argues, "is patently false." ² "In the areas of official languages, political boundaries, and the division of powers, there is no way to avoid supporting this or that societal culture." ³

The aim of this article is to challenge the widely accepted assumption that liberal neutrality is irrelevant to thinking about cultural and linguistic diversity. Focusing on the problem of language policy, I argue that liberal neutrality represents a coherent position that should play a modest, but not negligible, role in the construction of a normative theory of language politics. A rehabilitation of the idea of liberal neutrality as part of what I will call a hybrid theory of language policy points to a distinctive and appealing way of making the case for minority language rights and also to an understanding of the reasonable limits that can be placed on such rights.

The argument for these claims unfolds in five sections. I begin by reviewing in Section I two important social facts that provide the necessary backdrop to any normative discussion of language policy. I then connect these facts with the phenomenon of linguistic conflict and briefly describe two standard positions on how such conflicts should be resolved in Section II. I introduce in Section III the idea of liberal neutrality as an alternative possible position about how language conflicts should be resolved, and defend the idea from the charge of incoherence. Section IV of the article offers a brief account of the prima facie appeal of liberal neutrality and proposes an analytic framework for deciding when the liberal neutrality model should be compromised or abandoned. Finally, I confront the liberal neutrality position with one of the two standard positions—the "common public language model"—introduced earlier (leaving consideration of the second for another occasion) in Section V. I argue that the common public language model should partially, but not fully, displace liberal neutrality in a normative theory of language politics. The best way of thinking normatively about language policy will involve a hybrid of these different approaches.

I

According to recent estimates there are over six thousand languages spoken around the world today. The vast majority are spoken by relatively small numbers of people, with nearly 85 percent claiming fewer than a hundred thousand speakers, about half having fewer than six thousand speakers, and about 30 percent with fewer than a thousand speakers. Even focusing on languages spoken by fairly large numbers of people, however, global linguistic diversity is very impressive. As many as three hundred of the world's languages are spoken by over one million people, and about eighty have more than ten million speakers. ⁴

Since there are only about two hundred states in the world, it is obvious that linguistic diversity is found within states as well as at the global level. If every language group were perfectly concentrated within the boundaries of a state, and there were no international migration, each state in the world would have an average of thirty languages and an average of about five that are spoken by more than one hundred thousand people. We know, however, that the world's languages are not evenly spread amongst the different states. About 70 percent are concentrated in just twenty countries, most of them tropical countries in the developing world.

But we also know that language communities frequently straddle political boundaries and that...