Language and the Right to Communicate

Pradip N. Thomas

The reports of an upsurge in inter-religious conflicts in India – that peaked in December 1998 in the state of Gujarat, and of sporadic violence against religious minorities and missionaries in the Indian states of Orissa, Bihar, Karnataka and Kerala during the first half of 1999, once again brought into sharp relief some of the tensions besetting democracy in India.1 While Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs have suffered the consequences of planned and random inter-religious, ‘communal’ violence for years, it is only recently that the Christian minority has become a target of such violence. The following article explores this scenario.

Dina Iordanova

. A continuous footage taken through the window of a moving car. The houses on both sides of the road are either fully burnt or semi-destroyed. It goes on like this mile after mile.

David Wanless

In a country like South Africa, several languages are dominant and many others are used by smaller communities. How is it possible to protect this diversity and to encourage the survival of wiords as ideas?

A Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights was drawn up at a meeting of institutions and NGOs which took place in Barcelona, Spain, 6-9 June 1996. Signatories affirmed 52 Articles covering a wide range of issues including concepts and rights, general principles, public administration and official bodies, education, proper names, communications media and new technologies, culture and the socio-economic sphere. Participants also took into account non-sovereign peoples, the subordination of non-dominant languages, and linguistic and cultural diversity.

Every day somewhere in the world a child, a woman, a man stops speaking their mother tongue. The world's languages are disappearing faster than ever before in human history. Some predictions are that 90% of the world's languages are in danger of dying out within a century. The linguistic diversity that has been an essential characteristic of the human species is being replaced by a system in which some languages are expanding at the cost of others. This is now true within nation states and the global system. Control over someone’s language has become one of the primary means of exerting power over other aspects of people’s life.

Linda Slough

Depriving a person of their mother tongue is a crime comparable with isolating them from their history, culture and spirituality. The following article touches on the sensitive issue of the United Church of Canada's involvement in the Indian Residential School system and the pain and suffering it caused. It calls for reflection on the issues raised as people of faith continue to travel ‘the difficult road of repentance, reconciliation and healing.’

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas

How many languages are there in the world? Most linguists say around 6-7,000. The most useful source is still The Ethnologue, edited by Barbara Grimes from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a missionary organisation – see . The Ethnologue lists almost 6,800 languages in 228 countries. But there might be twice as many: 12-14,000 languages. How come? There are deaf people in all societies, and where hearing people have developed spoken, oral languages, the deaf have developed sign languages, fully-fledged, complex, abstract languages. This article discusses only oral languages - we still know too little about sign languages even if the literature is growing fast.

Philip Lee

Language, the essence of what it means to be human, can be perverted into ‘hate speech’. When used by the media, many virulent expressions acquire the stamp of respectability, ensuring that language is the last social system to recover from such degradation. The following article explores this hypothesis with particular reference to Argentina and Rwanda.

Cees J. Hamelink

Despite promising beginnings, there is still a long way to go in the realisation of the right to communicate. The following article argues that ‘Global civic organizations that represent public interest issues need to mobilize themselves and form alliances with other interested parties for active intervention in the fora of world communication governance.’ This is the fundamental challenge on the communications agenda of the 21st century.

Philip Cass

After the Second World War missions in Papua New Guinea faced new imperatives driven by the reaction of the Australian administration to UN directives. As a result the administration decided to use English as the sole language of education. These changes led to the closure of Tok Ples schools and the end of Tok Ples as the primary language of education for indigenous people. Most significantly, however, Tok Pisin came into its own as a lingua franca. These factors combined to shift the role of language as an identifier from a purely village or regional level (Tok Ples) to a national one (Tok Pisin) Subsequent educational policies have reversed this situation. This article argues that for a country with so many languages the temporary sacrifice of a few indigenous languages was justified. Implicit in the paper is the argument that Tok Pisin should be treated as a language indigenous to PNG and that attempts to suppress it or dismiss it by metropolitan administrations and missions failed completely because it was a language that grew out of the people themselves.