We need a global language rights movement: Confronting the global language crisis with insights from social movement studies

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, academics and activists have been drawing attention to a slow-moving global crisis: the ongoing destruction of global linguistic diversity. Despite this attention, language loss has proceeded unabated, and conservative estimates now suggest that around half the world's languages will no longer be in use by the end of this century. In this provocation, I argue that only a global mass movement has the capacity to change the course of this crisis. I furthermore argue that a rights-based approach, centred on language rights, is our best bet for organising such a movement. Drawing on social movement studies, and my own experience as a language rights researcher and advocate, I explore three key areas where language rights provide the foundations for a mass movement in defence of linguistic diversity. First, I look at how language rights provide a discursive frame that resonates with other movements and clarifies the problem that needs to be addressed. Second, I look at how the concept of language rights can help recruit individuals and organisations into a mass movement and sustain their involvement in the cause. Third, I discuss how language rights provide a basis for effective collective action. In the conclusion I briefly discuss some of the challenges that will need to be overcome in forming a global mass movement for language rights.

Full text

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Global Social Challenges Journal • vol XX • no XX • 1–15 • © Author 2024
Online ISSN 2752-3349 • https://doi.org/10.1332/27523349Y2024D000000029
Accepted for publication 22 October 2024 • First published online 15 November 2024
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
INTERVENTIONS: PROVOCATION
We need a global language rights movement:
confronting the global language crisis with insights
from social movement studies
Gerald Roche, g.roche@latrobe.edu.au
La Trobe University, Australia
Since the late 1980s, academics and activists have been drawing attention to a slow-moving
global crisis: the ongoing destruction of global linguistic diversity. Despite this attention,
language loss has proceeded unabated, and conservative estimates now suggest that around half
the world’s languages will no longer be in use by the end of this century. In this provocation, I
argue that only a global mass movement has the capacity to change the course of this crisis. I
furthermore argue that a rights-based approach, centred on language rights, is our best bet for
organising such a movement. Drawing on social movement studies, and my own experience
as a language rights researcher and advocate, I explore three key areas where language rights
provide the foundations for a mass movement in defence of linguistic diversity. First, I look
at how language rights provide a discursive frame that resonates with other movements and
clarifies the problem that needs to be addressed. Second, I look at how the concept of language
rights can help recruit individuals and organisations into a mass movement and sustain their
involvement in the cause. Third, I discuss how language rights provide a basis for eective
collective action. In the conclusion I briefly discuss some of the challenges that will need to
be overcome in forming a global mass movement for language rights.
Keywords language rights • social movement • human rights • crisis
Key messages
• A mass movement to defend language rights is needed to halt the destruction of global
linguistic diversity.
• A human rights framework will give the movement resonance with diverse audiences.
• A rights framework will support movement building by facilitating recruitment and
building solidarity.
• Rights-based strategies and tactics would help a mass movement win language rights
for everyone.
To cite this article: Roche, G. (2024) We need a global language rights movement:
confronting the global language crisis with insights from social movement studies, Global
Social Challenges Journal, Early View, DOI: 10.1332/27523349Y2024D000000029
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Gerald Roche
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Introduction: Language rights, social movements and the
global language crisis
Rights are never eective simply because they are legal rights. Enjoying
human rights in practice depends on … the pressure that people bring to
bear because they have a ‘right to have rights’ – even where they do not
have rights in law, or law is administered unjustly … Collective action is
needed … if human rights are to make a real dierence.
Kate Nash (2015: 750)
Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a
piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a
people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent
resistance of the populace.
Rudolf Rocker (1989: 75)
The ongoing destruction of the world’s linguistic diversity is one of several slow-moving
crises besetting humanity today (Roche, 2022a). One estimate, based on systematic data
aggregated for thousands of individual languages, suggests that at least half the world’s
languages will no longer be in use by the end of the century (Campbell and Belew, 2018).
Another estimate, based on the projection of demographic data, suggests that the rate of
global language loss is likely to triple in the next 40 years, resulting in the loss of 1,500
languages by the start of the 22nd century (Bromham et al, 2022). Although language loss
has occurred in the past, it has now entered a qualitatively and quantitatively unprecedented
phase, propelling humanity rapidly towards a future of greatly diminished diversity.
This crisis of global linguistic diversity directly impacts some of the most vulnerable
people on the planet: Indigenous people, asylum-seekers, refugees, stateless people,
ethnic minorities, internally displaced people, and victims of genocide, ethnic
cleansing and other atrocities. As linguistic diversity is destroyed, much more than
language is lost: group identities, social structures, collective knowledge and individual
life chances are also violently transformed.
International mechanisms, including formal declarations such as the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNGA, 2007), and informal
statements such as the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (UDLR Follow-up
Committee, 1998), have aimed to address this crisis by advocating the legal protection
of language rights, such as the right to use, develop and transmit languages, or to use
them in specific contexts, such as education and the media. However, the academic
literature on language rights (see Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson, 2023 for a state-
of-the-art review), shows that such rights are seldom enshrined in domestic or
international law, and rarely respected when they are.
Rather than relying on the law, addressing the global crisis of linguistic diversity
requires a mass movement that mobilises to defend language rights. As both Nash
and Rocker argue in the epigraphs that open this introduction, the foundation of
rights is not necessarily law, but rather a shared sense of injustice and a willingness
to bring rights into existence through collective action. In the words of Richards
and Carbonetti (2013), we are ‘worth what we decide’: we can have any rights we
consider important and work collectively to achieve, including language rights.
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In this article, I build on this insight to explore how the global crisis of linguistic
diversity can be addressed through mass collective action in pursuit of language
rights. To do this, I draw on social movement studies, which focus on how
sustained, collective, contentious action creates social, political and cultural change
by challenging those in power (Tarrow, 2022). My analysis also draws on my own
experience advocating for and researching language rights.1 This provocation focuses
on three main topics to explore how we can build a mass movement for language
rights: language rights as discourse, language rights and movement building, and
language rights and collective action.2 Before turning to these topics, I briefly
introduce the state of language activism today, in order to show what a social
movements approach to language rights can contribute to contemporary struggles.
A world of language struggles
People around the world today are struggling to hold on to their languages in the face
of massive challenges (Urla, 2012; O’Rourke and Dayán-Fernández, 2024). Broadly,
we can recognise four dierent types of social movements that focus on language.
One is language revitalisation, where communities work to bring back and assert
greater control over a language that has undergone a severe decrease in speakers, or
may have ceased being used altogether, such as the Indigenous languages of Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, the US and Scandinavia (Hinton et al, 2018). A second
type of language activism is seen in large, relatively well-organised movements that
aim to maintain and improve the fortunes of minority languages, such as Catalan in
Spain, Igbo in Nigeria, Afaan Oromo in Ethiopia, Uyghur in China or Balinese in
Indonesia (De Korne, 2021). A third type is heritage language movements among
diasporic communities (Montrul and Polinsky, 2021), and related eorts to ensure
language access to asylum-seekers and refugees. A fourth type of language-focused
social movement is what I call ‘language practice movements’ (Eckert, 2015). These
are informal, non-organised acts of linguistic endurance whereby linguistic minorities
continue using their language despite explicit or implicit eorts of the state and other
powerful agents to suppress it, without necessarily aiming to deliberately change their
political or linguistic circumstances (Bayat, 2010; Roche, 2024).
This article argues that language rights provide a powerful political mechanism to
bring these four types of movement together into a more coherent global movement
that has the potential to eectively confront the global language crisis. Currently, these
four types of language movements largely act separately from each other. Furthermore,
movements for individual languages within each of the four groups are also often
disconnected from one another. Movements for specific languages typically operate
as what social movement theorists Cox and Nilsen (2014, drawing on Williams,
1989) call ‘militant particularisms’: political struggles that are characterised by their
‘specificity and situatedness’ and strong links to a ‘particular place [and] time’ (Cox
and Nilson, 2014: 76). Confronting the global scale of the rapid loss of languages
requires these ‘militant particularisms’ to come together into a broad, coherent mass
social movement.
While these diverse language movements remain disconnected, the concept of
language rights is also underutilised in these struggles. This follows a broad turn
away from language rights that took place beginning in the 1980s (Ruíz, 1984),
and gathered pace in the 1990s (Lo Bianco, 2001). During this time, language
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Gerald Roche
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increasingly came to be seen as a ‘resource’ that individuals should take responsibility
for, a stance broadly coherent with neoliberal ideologies and practices that pursue
social disinvestment and the individualisation of responsibility for collective goods. As
policy abandoned the concept of language of rights, academics largely followed suit
(May, 2012; Bale, 2016), leaving linguistic minorities with little support or impetus
to take up a language rights approach in their struggles.
The rest of this article outlines how language rights can serve the political agendas
of individual language movements while also building cooperation, mutual learning,
and solidarity between them, in order to pursue mass collective action in a way that
advances our chances of successfully confronting the global language crisis.
Discussing language rights: language rights as a collective
action frame
Language rights provide a useful way of talking about the crisis of linguistic diversity
that resonates with a diversity of actors, provides clarity around the problem to be
addressed, and addresses the shortcomings of alternative approaches. The concept of
language rights does this by providing what social movement theorists refer to as a
‘frame’: a set of discursive processes that selectively shape perception, cognition and
aect in order to simplify real-world complexities and promote specific interpretations
and constructions of reality (Snow et al, 2019).
Viewing the crisis of linguistic diversity through a language rights frame creates
resonance with a wide variety of audiences. As Beitz and Goodin (2009: 1) claim,
human rights have attained the status of a ‘lingua franca of global moral discourse’.
Despite increasing attacks on human rights defenders, eorts to de-universalise
human rights, and a range of critiques of human rights from activists, journalists
and academics, human rights still provide one of the most widely accepted frames
for talking about political problems today. Human rights thus act as a ‘master frame’,
that is, a frame that is ‘suciently elastic, flexible, and inclusive that other movements
might employ it’ (Snow et al, 2019: 395). Language rights should therefore take
their place alongside women’s rights, workers’ rights, the right to self-determination,
economic rights, children’s rights, the rights of nature, LGBTQI+ rights, disability
rights, the right to know, and others.
A language rights frame can thus give the issue salience to a wide range of actors,
including governments, major civil society actors, and interstate organs such as the
United Nations. Additionally, a language rights frame also provides clarity and orients
actors towards proactive solutions, through the basic ‘core tasks’ of framing processes:
diagnosis, prognosis and motivation.
Diagnostic framing refers to the identification of a problem in a way that transforms
it from a collective grievance to a pathway for collective action. To do this, diagnostic
framing must, first, arm that the issue can be impacted by collective action, that
is, the problem is not inevitable, natural or simply ‘the way things are’, asserting,
in the words of anthropologist David Graeber (2016: 89), that ‘the world doesn’t
just happen. It isn’t a natural fact … it exists because we all collectively produce it’.
Second, diagnostic framing eschews victim-blaming and avoids the focus on individual
responsibility that is typical of conservative and reactionary approaches. Third, within
the broader context of all social movements’ oppositional nature, diagnostic framing
must identify the agents responsible for the problem: the power-holders who engage
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We need a global language rights movement
5
in oppression, perpetrate injustice and violate rights. Diagnostic framing, then, arms
that a problem can be solved, and identifies who must be influenced in order to
solve it. A language rights framing thus asserts that declining linguistic diversity is
not inevitable or natural. It rejects any suggestion that individuals or communities
‘choose’ to ‘abandon’ their languages, and instead encourages us to identify agents
of oppression who violate people’s rights.
Once a problem has been thus diagnosed, prognostic framing involves identifying
suitable solutions. This typically involves setting goals and plotting a course of
action to obtain that goal. Anheier et al (2001) provide a useful typology of general
approaches: rejectionist, alternative and reformist. While rejectionists adopt a
radical approach seeking to totally undo fundamental elements of the status quo,
reformists seek to maintain prevalent structures but tweak their operation in the
service of aicted groups. Those seeking alternatives, meanwhile, reject the status
quo without seeking its reform or dissolution, and instead seek to create viable
alternatives outside its structures. These broad approaches have implications for the
specific tactics and strategies used by a movement (discussed later). In the case of a
language rights movement, the end goal must be the elimination of language rights
violations for everyone; whether this is best achieved by rejectionist, alternative or
reformist approaches is a matter for debate within the movement. What matters is
that a human master rights frame already associates the issue with activism, rather
than other approaches, such as technology-based interventions, which have already
proved to have limited impacts.
The third core task of any social movement frame is motivational framing, which
encourages people to participate in collective action to solve the identified problem in
the proposed way. Motivational framing often taps into people’s values and emotions,
including outrage, fear, grief and joy, in order to encourage sustained participation
(Jasper, 2014). Two common forms of motivational framing are collective threat
framing, which uses fear to provoke action against a common threat, and injustice
framing, which provokes outrage at inequality, exclusion, domination, exploitation
and other forms of injustice (Tarrow, 2022). Both forms of motivational framing are
relevant to language rights, given that language rights violations actively harm aected
individuals and communities (Roche, 2022b), and that language forms a significant
aspect of collective identities that can serve as the basis for injustice.3
A final benefit of language rights framing is that it addresses the shortcomings of
dominant alternative frames for thinking about, discussing and acting against the crisis
of linguistic diversity. The two most prominent alternative frames available today are
nationalist and endangerment frames. A nationalist framing emphasises essentialist links
between a language and nation, and is deployed both by state and insurgent actors. Not
only has this frame proven to be a source of language rights violations – by promoting
national languages against those of minorities – but it also hampers mass mobilisation
by miring struggles in the sort of disconnected ‘militant particularisms’ described
earlier. Endangerment framing, meanwhile, draws on the framing of environmental
movements to promote an ecological understanding of declining linguistic diversity
as parallel to declining biodiversity. It has been resoundingly critiqued by Indigenous
activists and academics (Leonard, 2023) and its impacts have largely been limited to
extractive production of linguistic data.
In contrast to these approaches, a language rights framing encourages mass collective
action with a clear aim of influencing the behaviours of actors who violate language
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Gerald Roche
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rights. These might be various agents of the state, dominant social groups such
as ethnic or religious groups, corporations and other private actors, domestic or
transnational civil society groups, or even other social movements. As opposed to
nationalist and endangerment frames, a rights-based frame provides a clear path to
collective action: language rights violators need to be identified and social movement
actors need to engage in collective action to change those violators’ behaviours. Such
collective action is most eective when it brings a large number of people together
(Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011). Fortunately, language rights solve this problem too,
by facilitating participation in a mass movement.
Bringing people together: building a language
rights movement
The capacity of language rights to bring large numbers of people together is based
on their relation to the human rights master frame, which supports three crucial
functions: alignment, ranking and diusion (Almeida, 2019). Frame alignment refers
to the capacity of a frame to align various groups across a range of political, cultural,
economic and social contexts; a language rights frame allows diverse actors to align
their agendas with each other, and with other civil society actors (as explored later).
Second, language rights also enable activists and others to place the issue of language
in a hierarchy of concerns: a human rights master frame elevates language to a central
concern, alongside other human rights issues, and above more parochial, less universal
problems. Finally, adopting a human rights master frame for language also enables
frame diusion: the spread of a particular frame across diverse geographical, political,
cultural and social spaces. The widespread resonance of human rights reduces barriers
for its entry into new contexts; although the concept of ‘human rights’ presents
translational challenges, culturally and linguistically (Holcombe, 2018), the concept
is not language-bound and can be translated into diverse contexts.4
A language rights frame, then, makes the issue legible to both power-holders
and a wide range of ordinary people. But building a mass movement requires more
than awareness and understanding: people have to mobilise around a concept, and a
movement needs to grow its power by increasing participation.5 Movement building
involves identifying a wide ‘sympathy pool’ within the general population: people
who would, at minimum, not actively oppose the movement and its actions, but
more optimistically, might be encouraged to join and participate in the movement
(Almeida, 2019). At the core of the sympathy pool for a global language rights
movement would be those people who experience chronic, systemic language rights
violations. Globally, this population is in the hundreds of millions, if not billions,
a fact we can deduce from the observation that of the 193 member states of the
United Nations, 162 (84 per cent) are found in the Endangered Languages Project’s
Catalogue of Endangered Languages,6 suggesting that most countries in the world
are home to populations that experience some degree of language rights violations.
Monoglot English-speakers with limited experience of the majority world face an
epistemic impediment in recognising the scale of this problem.
Beyond the immediate sympathy pool of people who have direct experience of
language rights violations, and therefore personal interest in participating in a mass
movement for language rights, a secondary group of people have overlapping interests
that also place them in the sympathy pool. This includes a wide range of social and
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We need a global language rights movement
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professional groups including, but not limited to: deaf, blind, neurodivergent and
disabled people with distinct communication needs; refugees, displaced people
and migrants; interpreters and translators; Esperantists; language teachers; speech
pathologists; language access and localisation specialists; and a range of academics
including linguists, sociolinguists, applied linguists, education specialists, health
communication experts, anthropologists and so on. A less directly impacted group
in the language rights sympathy pool would be people who encounter linguistic
diversity in their work and are motivated to promote more just social arrangements,
including: legal, health, media and education professionals; unionists; faith groups; a
range of human rights activists and participants in progressive social movements; and
humanitarian aid workers. While the resonance of human rights gives the language
rights movement wide legibility and legitimacy, identifying these (and other) members
of the global sympathy pool enables recruitment into the movement, both through
individual targeting and ‘bloc recruitment’: ‘the way in which social movement
organizers often recruit members and participants among groups of individuals already
organized for some other purpose’ (Oberschall, 1993: 24).
In addition to identifying sympathy pools and engaging in bloc recruitment, social
movements grow and are sustained by promoting a distinctive identity associated
with the movement (della Porta and Diani, 2020). Collective identities help create
movement commitment, which sustains participation in the face of challenges (such
as repression and backlash, explored later) by creating meaning for the individuals
involved, and attaching social movement participation to powerful values, emotions
and cultural symbols (Jasper, 2014). Studies show that some social groups, such as
students, are more likely to participate in social movements than others; these are
described as having the ‘biographical availability’ to participate (McAdam, 1988).
Participation also changes across the lifespan, with people shifting in and out of,
and between, social movements as their roles and responsibilities change over time.
Collective identities both attract and hold individuals to a movement. What kind
of identities might a language rights movement promote? Broadly, human rights
movements have in part been sustained through the construction of a ‘human
rights defender’ identity, which is also recognised in, for example, the oce of the
UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders,7 and in multiple international
awards. This creates the possibility of promoting a ‘language rights defender’ identity,
which would help overcome the ‘militant particularism’ of movements in defence of
individual languages; would it be enough to drive recruitment and sustain participation
in a mass movement?
Bringing together a large and diverse group of people into a global mass movement
will require participants to act in solidarity: the ‘freely chosen decision to defer to the
motives or imperatives of others’ (Graeber, 2009: 325). Movement participants will
need to defer to the ‘motives and imperatives’ of dierent campaigns at dierent times,
sometimes sacrificing their own immediate interests to support others. Negotiating
this solidarity will present complex challenges as groups with overlapping but
dierent histories of oppression attempt to work together and develop empathy for
each other (Liu and Shange, 2018). It will be important to acknowledge that, as in
other movements, solidarity within the language rights movement will sometimes
have counterproductive and even oppressive eects that need to be acknowledged
and addressed (Featherstone, 2012). Nonetheless, such solidarity will be necessary
not only for building a mass movement, but also for operating within a complex
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Gerald Roche
8
transnational political landscape where rights are not evenly respected. The language
rights movement will need to follow other rights-based movements to engage in what
Keck and Sikkink (1998) call ‘boomerang activism’: when activists in one country
(a repressive regime), seek external support from activists in other (less repressive)
countries to pressure their government in interstate forums. Cultivating solidarity
will thus enable language rights activists to work together within a mass movement
and across dierent political contexts.
Getting language rights: collective action for language rights
Language rights, then, can help frame a problem and grow a mass movement to
address it. In this section, I argue that language rights also provide guidance on the
sort of strategies, tactics and actions that this movement can use to stop language
rights violations.
Language rights will not be won without conflict. All mass movements engage in
‘contentious politics’ (Tarrow, 2015), which also includes other forms of conflict,
such as terrorism, civil war and revolution. A central pillar of social movement
theory and practice is thus that any real political change is conflictual, as explained
by the community organiser Saul Alinksy (1989: 21): ‘Change means movement.
Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract
world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict’.
In the struggle for language rights, this conflict involves the identification of rights
violators, and attempts to win over the general population into the sympathy pool,
if not active participation in the movement, to challenge the power and end the
impunity of those violators.
There are many ways to carry out such a conflict. Della Porta and Diani (2020)
identify three contentious ‘logics’: the logic of numbers, of damage and of bearing
witness. The logic of numbers refers to the pressure exerted by the force of mass
participation, seen, for example, in street demonstrations, petitions and social media
protests. Such demonstrations of numbers often function as a signal of the potential
damage that a movement could wreak if it wanted to (Tufekci, 2017). The logic of
damage, meanwhile, seeks to impose high costs on power-holders in order to coerce
behaviour change. Damage might be reputational (such as the damage done to state
actors in international forums when their rights track record is repeatedly criticised;
Franklin, 2008) or it can be material: damaging infrastructure, imposing economic
costs through sanctions, or the damage to business imposed by strikes (McAlevey,
2016). Finally, the logic of witnessing is often employed when power-holders are
particularly entrenched and unlikely to cease violating rights; it aims to document
violations and win an abstract, historical victory by undermining the moral authority
of power-holders. Each of these logics provides a dierent way of pressuring power-
holders to cease violating language rights. A mass movement for language rights will
need to adopt each of these logics at dierent times and places.
In addition to adopting these broader logics, a mass movement for language
rights will need to deploy a range of tactics and campaign strategies to achieve its
goals. To do this, activists can draw on the collective wisdom found in practical
literature from human rights advocates. Examples include training modules from
Amnesty International8 and a range of other free online courses,9 as well as the
United Nations Training Manual on Human Rights Monitoring10 and several manuals
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We need a global language rights movement
9
from the Advocates for Human Rights.11 An important lesson from the academic
literature on human rights advocacy is that naming and shaming – isolating specific
individuals or institutions and applying public pressure to change their behaviour –
is an eective tactic, but only under certain conditions (Krain, 2012; Murdie and
Davis, 2012; Hendrix and Wong, 2013). Activist-academics such as Human Rights
Watch’s Jo Becker (2013; 2017) have also distilled several other important lessons
about framing, campaign organisation and issue selection that the language rights
movement could learn from. While providing clear examples to follow, this literature
also raises important questions for the language rights movement, such as how to
eectively campaign on an issue that is often driven by diuse social and political
structures rather than identifiable individuals (Roth, 2004).
The language rights movement can also look to social movements beyond
human rights advocacy to assemble a broad tactical repertoire in order to achieve
its goals. Tarrow (2022) divides social movement tactics into three types: contained,
confrontational and violent. Contained actions are those that are legal and non-
disruptive, including petitions, teach-ins, political theatre, writing op-eds, and
awareness-raising campaigns. Confrontational actions are often socially discouraged but
legal; they also may take place in legal grey areas or be illegal. These confrontational
actions aim to interrupt power-holders and members of the public, and might include
demonstrations, rallies, occupations, blockades, sabotage, vandalism, harassment of
public ocials (AKA bird-dogging) and other actions.12 Gene Sharp (1973) provides
a list of nearly 200 contained and confrontational non-violent protest actions, many
of which could be employed by a global language rights movement.13 Violent actions,
finally, inflict significant harm or death on persons, whether protestors themselves
(such as hunger-strikes or self-immolations; Bargu, 2014), power-holders (for instance,
assassinations) or members of the general public (suicide bombing, for example). The
use of violence for political ends remains contentious (Frazer and Hutchings, 2020)
but is also considered morally and legally legitimate in certain cases (most notably in
the case of self-defence). A language rights movement will need to selectively adopt
tactics from this wide social movement repertoire according to local and strategic
contexts, while also developing its own unique tactics to pursue its goals.
Whatever actions are adopted in language rights campaigns, the movement
will inevitably encounter backlash and repression, and can thus learn from other
movements how to anticipate, avoid, endure and tactically respond to these negative
reactions. Repression is carried out by power-holders to avoid meeting their
obligations and protect their impunity. Repressive strategies typically escalate from
low-cost techniques of silence, denial and avoidance, to medium-cost tactics of
disinformation, reputational damage to activists or appeasement through tokenistic
changes, to high-cost strategies involving a range of legal, economic and physical
attacks (Cobb and Ross, 1997); language rights activists will need to study how and
when resistance to repression is likely to be eective (Bakke et al, 2019; Smidt etal,
2021). Simultaneously, movements must also deal with backlash, which is more
diuse and social in nature than repression (Faludi, 1992). Backlash may manifest as
diuse, disorganised resistance that hampers the growth of a movement and drains the
sympathy pool, or it may take the form of organised countermovements that exploit
social movement strategies, tactics and framing for reactionary ends (Bob, 2012; 2019).
Finally, language rights activists can also learn from other movements how
to assess their impact. Although the public often evaluate social movements
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Gerald Roche
10
according to a harsh binary of success versus failure, activists and academics have
developed a range of flexible tools for exploring social movement impact (Haiven
and Khasnabish, 2013). An early rubric was developed by political scientist Paul
Schumaker (1975), who created a sliding scale of ‘responsiveness’ achieved by
social movements, moving from ‘access responsiveness’ (power-holders agree
to listen to movement demands), to ‘agenda responsiveness’ (power-holders
agree to discuss the issue), ‘policy responsiveness’ (new policies are created to
address the issues), ‘output responsiveness’ (the policies are actually funded and
implemented) and ‘impact responsiveness’ (the issue is ameliorated or resolved).
Tarrow (2022) describes how social movement theorists now explore the impact
of social movements beyond this responsiveness framework, to look at how they
transform individual life trajectories and create broad cultural and political change.
The crucial question that must be faced by language rights activists, is: what will
success look like for individual language rights campaigns, and for the language
rights movement in general?
Conclusion: A world of language rights to win
We have a world of language rights to win, but we need a mass movement to win
it. Having already outlined some of the key building blocks of what a mass language
rights movement could look like, I conclude with a few words of caution.
To begin with, we need to be permanently vigilant to the fact that, like other
human rights discourses, language rights discourses can be abused and coopted
(Bob, 2019). For example, Hutton (1999: 4) has pointed out that, ‘Nazism was a
language-rights movement’ that justified violent expansion and genocide in the name
of creating a homeland for German speakers. More recently, we have seen language
rights discourses abused in justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
We can address such abuses of language rights discourses by ensuring that the
movement repudiates structures of violence that are embedded in the modern world
system. This can be done by pursuing a decolonial vision of language rights (Kabel,
2023: 160) that eschews ‘marshaling human rights as a smokescreen for neoliberal
dispossession and conquest’, and insists on interrogating ‘wider questions of inequality,
militarism, and empire’ as part of our eorts to achieve language rights for everyone.
This will entail the movement explicitly rejecting the ‘human right to dominate’
claimed by many powerful actors today (Perugini and Godon, 2015).
Similarly, we also need to ensure that a global language rights movement actively
respects the language rights of everyone who participates in the movement, rather
than reproducing existing hierarchies and their harms. As Yael Peled (2023) points
out, English has too often acted as an unexamined and supposedly neutral lingua
franca of social movements, in contradiction to their valorisation of diversity, mass
appeal and solidarity. The global movement for language rights must therefore be a
movement both for and of many languages.
Finally, we need to approach the global struggle for language rights fully aware that
we live in troubled times, characterised by climate breakdown, declining democracy
and rising geopolitical tensions, all exacerbated by an endlessly adaptive and resilient
capitalist system (Fraser, 2022). Pursuing language rights in these conditions will be
messy and complex. There will be failures and setbacks. It will be very dicult to
create radical change. But none of this means it will be impossible.
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We need a global language rights movement
11
Notes
1 From 2022 to 2024 I was co-chair of the Global Coalition for Language Rights (https://
www.coalitionforlanguagerights.org). I have also spent several years advocating to
support threatened languages in Tibet (see Roche, 2024).
2 As explained later, ‘movement building’ refers to eorts aimed at increasing participation
in a social movement, by recruiting new individuals and organisations to participate.
‘Collective action’, meanwhile, describes what people do in a social movement: the
actions they carry out together to meet their goals, including protest tactics and
information-sharing strategies.
3 Language-based identities include, but are by no means limited to, ethnic identities. A
more detailed discussion of the complex relationship between ethnicity, language and
identity is unfortunately beyond the scope of this brief article.
4 See, for example, the Global Coalition for Language Rights Declaration on Understanding
and Defending Language Rights, available in nearly 80 languages: https://www.
coalitionforlanguagerights.org/post/understanding-and-defending-language-rights.
5 There is no denite sequence that describes or predicts how social movements build
participation. Nonetheless, Tarrow (2022) notes that diusing a movement across spatial
and social scales is a central challenge that all movements face, in addition to countering
suppression by elites. This challenge is almost always addressed through deliberate eorts
carried out by those most eected by an issue in coordination with allies from other
social movements and the broader population.
6 https://endangeredlanguages.com/about_catalogue/.
7 https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-human-rights-defenders.
8 https://www.amnesty.org.au/skill-up/.
9 https://www.humanrightscareers.com/courses/.
10 https://www.ohchr.org/en/publications/policy-and-methodological-publications/
manual-human-rights-monitoring-revised-edition.
11 https://www.theadvocatesforhumanrights.org/Manuals.
12 Similar to this distinction between confrontational and contained actions, David Graeber
distinguishes between protest, which consists of an appeal to authorities, and direct
action, which entails acting as if power structures did not exist: ‘the deant insistence
on acting as if one is already free’ (Graeber, 2014: 233). See also Graeber, 2009.
13 The Global Nonviolent Action Database (https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/browse-
methods) provides examples of each method listed by Sharp.
Funding
The author received no nancial support for the research, authorship and/or publication
of this article.
Acknowledgements
This article was written on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people, and I pay my
respects to their Elders past and present. In the spirit of supporting Indigenous calls for
truth-telling, I would also like to note that the institution where I wrote this article,
La Trobe University, is named after Charles La Trobe, who played a key role in the
dispossession and genocide of Aboriginal peoples in what is today the Australian state
of Victoria. I hope the university will change its name. Additionally, I would like to
acknowledge the useful feedback from two anonymous reviewers, which helped me rene
my arguments, and to express my thanks to the editors of Global Social Challenges Journal
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Gerald Roche
12
for their support. Finally, I would also like to acknowledge the many fruitful conversations
I had with members of the Global Coalition for Language Rights, which inspired me to
believe that a global movement for language rights is both necessary and possible.
Conict of interest
The author declares that there is no conict of interest.
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