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Pluricentric linguistic justice: a new ethics-based approach to pluricentricity in French and other languages

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Published/Copyright: November 18, 2021

Abstract

Drawing on the example of the French-speaking world, this article makes the case for the valuable contribution of a systematic ethics-based approach to understanding linguistic pluricentricity. Following a critical review of three key definitional dimensions of the concept - political, linguistic and representational/attitudinal - it argues for the inclusion of a fourth ethical dimension to assess whether there are moral arguments which might also favour the recognition of distinct national standards. It builds on the recent linguistic justice literature in the fields of political theory and political philosophy to propose the notion of “pluricentric linguistic justice” as a framework for evaluating the ethics of local norm-setting and enforcement in pluricentric contexts. To demonstrate how pluricentric linguistic justice might be assessed, it examines a series of valued-based arguments discussed in the linguistic justice literature relating to the instrumental and identity functions of language, considering how they might apply to specific contexts in the French-speaking world. Besides contributing to existing theory, the notion of pluricentric linguistic justice has the potential to help advance social equality, by drawing attention to some of the social and political injustices associated with diatopic variation in spatially diffused languages more generally.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Yael Peled, Jeroen Darquennes and the two peer reviewers for their useful comments on previous versions of this article.

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Published Online: 2021-11-18
Published in Print: 2021-11-12

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Titelei
  2. Vorwort/Preface/Préface
  3. New perspectives on pluricentricity
  4. On the elasticity of centres and the possibility of multiple roofs: revisiting some of Ulrich Ammon’s views on language variation and pluricentricity
  5. Reflections on linguistic pluricentricity
  6. Pluricentric linguistic justice: a new ethics-based approach to pluricentricity in French and other languages
  7. Pluricentricity and minority languages: the difficult case of North Frisian
  8. De jure but not de facto: pluricentric Portuguese in post-colonial Cabo Verde
  9. Pluricentricity in the classroom: the Serbo-Croatian language issue for foreign language teaching at higher education institutions worldwide
  10. Pluricentric communication beyond the standard language paradigm: perceptions of linguistic accommodation between speakers from Argentina and Spain in a mobility context
  11. Approaches to the study of address in pluricentric languages: methodological reflections
  12. Contrastivity and comparability: pragmatic variation across pluricentric varieties
  13. On the variation of fragmental constructions in British English and American English post-match interviews
  14. Thanking actions: interactional variation in Swedish-language service encounters in Sweden and Finland
  15. Berichte über Länder, Forschungsprojekte und Konferenzen/Reports on Countries, Research Projects and Conferences/Rapports sur les pays, projets de recherche et conférences
  16. Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages - communicative patterns in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish
  17. Besprechungen/Reviews/Comptes Rendus
  18. Bochmann, Klaus (ed.) (2020): Sprechen und Schreiben. Schriftsysteme und ihre linguistischen, kulturellen und politischen Dimensionen (Abhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig Philologisch-historische Klasse, 84(6)). Stuttgart & Leipzig: S. Hirzel. 112 p.
  19. Straszer, Boglárka/Wedin, Åsa (eds.) (2020): Modersmål, minoriteter och mångfald i förskola och skola [Muttersprache, Minderheiten und Vielfalt in Vorschule und Schule]. Lund: Studentlitteratur. 349 S.
  20. Roth, Kersten Sven/Wengeler, Martin/Ziem, Alexander (eds.) (2017): Handbuch Sprache in Politik und Gesellschaft (Handbücher Sprachwissen 19). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. 611 S.
  21. Peter, Benjamin (2020): L’Andalú - Sprache, Dialekt oder lokale Mundart? Zur diskursiven Konstruktion des Andalusischen (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 444). Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. XIX + 415 S.
  22. Ying, Chen (2017): Eine Studie zur Verbreitung der chinesischen Sprache in der Gemeinschaft der ethnischen Chinesen in den USA. Wuhan: Wuhan University Press. 303 S.
  23. Anschriften der Autoren/Addresses of the authors/Adresses des auteurs
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