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.
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.
Introduction: Language rights, social movements and the global language crisis
Rights are never effective 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 difference.
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.
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 different 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 efforts 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 efforts 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 effectively 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 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 affect 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, efforts 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 ‘sufficiently 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, affirm 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 in oppression, perpetrate injustice and violate rights. Diagnostic framing, then, affirms 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 afflicted 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 affected 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 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 effective 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 diffusion (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 diffusion: 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 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 office 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 different campaigns at different times, sometimes sacrificing their own immediate interests to support others. Negotiating this solidarity will present complex challenges as groups with overlapping but different 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 effects 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 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 different 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 different 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 different 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 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 effective 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 effectively campaign on an issue that is often driven by diffuse 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 officials (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 effective (Bakke et al, 2019; Smidt et al, 2021). Simultaneously, movements must also deal with backlash, which is more diffuse and social in nature than repression (Faludi, 1992). Backlash may manifest as diffuse, 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 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 efforts 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 difficult to create radical change. But none of this means it will be impossible.
Notes
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).
As explained later, ‘movement building’ refers to efforts 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.
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.
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.
There is no definite sequence that describes or predicts how social movements build participation. Nonetheless, Tarrow (2022) notes that diffusing 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 efforts carried out by those most effected by an issue in coordination with allies from other social movements and the broader population.
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 defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free’ (Graeber, 2014: 233). See also Graeber, 2009.
The Global Nonviolent Action Database (https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/browse-methods) provides examples of each method listed by Sharp.
Funding
The author received no financial 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 refine my arguments, and to express my thanks to the editors of Global Social Challenges Journal 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.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
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