How to upgrade the status of migrant languages in the European Union

Abstract

In this chapter, we will compare the status of traditional minority and migrant languages in the European context and its practical implications for the trade-off between mobility and inclusion. It has been observed that traditional minority languages in Central and Eastern European (CEE) states have fewer rights compared to official languages and that their status and position is best described by language hierarchies, asymmetries, subordination, and threshold restrictions. This against the background of international treaties, such as article 22 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFREU) stating that the European Union (EU) respects cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity and the charters of the Council of Europe (CoE). Although linguistic inequality is an unwanted state of affairs violating international treaties and obligations of member states, these traditional minority language cases might refer to the assignment of linguistic rights to languages of migrants. Both categories belong to the domain of the non-official, majority languages and are expected to be assigned less rights than ‘national languages’, although traditional minority languages have been assigned limited rights in terms of the personality principle next to the territoriality principle applied to the national languages. Note that the language rights of migrants in the EU are also restricted by the mobility-and-inclusion trade-off, which is detrimental to migrant languages in the national context. A solution to this inequality is provided by the fact that the personality principle is a common denominator in the assignment of linguistic rights to minority-language speakers and has already been introduced into transnational European spaces. Hence, the rights of migrant languages can be accounted for by applying the personality principle in these spaces as well. This results in a Union-wide supranational language policy for migrant languages which supports the upgrading of migrant languages in accordance with the personality principle.