Human Rights and Minority Languages: Immigrants’ Perspectives in Greece

Abstract

Human rights and their fortification through conventions and treaties are thought to be one of the greatest achievements of the previous century. A very important category of human rights is the Linguistic Human Rights (LHR). Linguistic Human Rights are connected to basic human rights and are of great importance in policy and planning. There have been numerous researches on language policies and in educational systems around the world. However, minority populations’ opinion, for example refugees’ opinion, is rarely represented in these researches. The present research aims at exploring the existing language policies in Greece in reference to minority languages. For the needs of this research six adult refugees participated in short semi-structured interviews. Even though participants seemed to be unaware of the term “Linguistic Human Rights”, most of them referred to the difficulty they have in exercising major human rights due to the monolingual policies that are followed in Greece. Taking into consideration the importance of Linguistic Human Rights and people’s need to use their mother language(s) in Greece, the last part of this research includes suggestions and ideas towards multilingual practices that come from different countries around the world.

Migration Policies and Immigrants’ Language Acquisition in EU‐15: Evidence from Twitter

“…The countries in this group have complex language landscapes, with linguistically independent languages being spoken in different regions of the countries or being used for different official purposes1 (Bruzos, Erdocia, and Khan 2018; Love 2015; Sharma 2018; Skourmalla and Sounoglou 2021). In Italy and Luxembourg, policy mechanisms intended to standardize and regulate official language usage were introduced at the beginning of the 21st century.…”

“…However, these policies created conflict with the communities that spoke different languages (Love 2015;Sharma 2018) and made linguistic integration more difficult for immigrants (Odero, Karathanasi, and Baumann 2016). In the case of Greece, language policies were introduced in the 1970s to homogenize the linguistic and cultural landscape of the country (Skourmalla and Sounoglou 2021). Before 2012, Greece required migrants to be proficient in Greek to acquire long-term residency (Tsoukalas et al 2010).…”

Studying Social Interactions Using Digital Trace Data

“…The countries in this group have complex language landscapes, with linguistically independent languages being spoken in different regions of the countries or being used for different official purposes 1 (Bruzos et al 2018;Love 2015;Sharma 2018;Skourmalla & Sounoglou 2021). In Italy and Luxembourg, policy mechanisms intended to standardize and regulate official language usage were introduced at the beginning of the 21 st century.…”

“…However, these policies created conflict with the communities that spoke different languages (Love 2015;Sharma 2018), and made linguistic integration more difficult for immigrants (Odero et al 2016). In the case of Greece, language policies were introduced in the 1970s to homogenize the linguistic and cultural landscape of the country (Skourmalla & Sounoglou 2021). Before 2012, Greece required migrants to be proficient in Greek to acquire long-term residency (Tsoukalas et al 2010).…”