Language in Human Rights

Languages are today being killed at a much faster pace than ever before in human history and linguistic diversity is disappearing relatively faster than biological diversity. Still, linguistic diversity is as necessary for the existence of our planet as biodiversity, and the two are correlated. Linguistic human rights are a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for the maintenance of linguistic diversity. Violations of linguistic human rights, especially in education, may lead to both ethnically articulated conflict and to reduction of linguistic and cultural diversity on our planet. The article analyses to what extent present linguistic human rights, especially in education, are sufficient to protect and maintain linguistic diversity and to function as the necessary corrective to the `free' market.