Language conflict and language rights: Ethnolinguistic perspectives on human conflict by William D. Davies and Stanley Dubinsky (review)

Language can play an important role in contributing to sociopolitical tension. Moreover, political conflicts are often characterized in linguistic terms. For example, the country of Cameroon, where both French and English are official languages, has recently seen significant internal conflict referred to as the Anglophone crisis (Pommerolle & De Marie Heungoup 2017), since it has primarily impacted the so-called Anglophone regions of the country. This label, however, is misleading: Cameroon is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, and the Anglophone/Francophone division is not, at heart, a linguistic one but, rather, is connected to the distinct colonial legacies from a time when its current territory was divided between British and French rule. Due to the salience of language in daily life, however, the linguistic emblems of the colonial period are used as a shorthand for a more complex kind of sociopolitical division.

Addressing this connection, William D. Davies and Stanley Dubinsky's book Language conflict and language rights: Ethnolinguistic perspectives on human conflict fills an important gap that most linguists have probably not even noticed: it serves as a nonspecialist introduction—from the perspective of linguistics—to the role that language plays in political conflicts and how individuals do (or do not) acquire rights to use the languages of their choosing. Despite the centrality of language to modern political structures and, by extension, the sociopolitical lives of individuals, the examination of apparent instances of linguistic conflict is not especially prominent within the discipline. The subject has attracted the attention of political scientists (see e.g. Laitin 1992). However, interdisciplinary ties between linguistics and political science are relatively weak, and, as a result, work of this kind does not appear to be widely read within linguistics, which makes this book a significant new addition to this area of investigation. The book's discussion is global in scope, and it presents detailed case studies of linguistic conflict impacting parts of Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and North America, while referencing additional examples from other parts of the world.

The book has features of both a textbook and a monograph. For instance, much of the material of Part I, 'Language and the speaker', contains content that would be covered in an introductory linguistics course. Part III, 'A typology of language conflicts', by contrast, characterizes a large number of political conflicts across the world where language differences are a major factor in the way that they manifest and is directly focused on the book's main topic. On the one hand, this structure would allow it to serve as the sole textbook for a course focusing on language conflict where it is also important to teach some basic linguistic concepts. On the other hand, a linguist looking to gain a greater appreciation of the role of language in political conflict would obtain a broad introduction to the topic by focusing on specific chapters. For the purposes of this review, I consider, at different times, how this book could serve as a textbook (specifically at the undergraduate level) as well as its more general contribution to the field.

As just mentioned, Part I of the book covers topics that would typically be considered in an introductory linguistics course. Each of its chapters is relatively short and written to be engaging to nonspecialists. At times, specific issues are highlighted that are relevant to the topic of language conflict but would not normally be seen as core topics in the relevant areas. For example, a significant amount of space in the chapter on morphology is dedicated to lexical borrowing, due to the fact that whether a language does (or does not) borrow words from languages it is in contact with is very often conditioned by sociopolitical concerns. Similarly, in a chapter on language variation and change, detailed discussion is provided on the distinction between 'languages...