teoretiska utblickar
National minority language education in the Nordic countries in the shadow of Council of Europe’s Minority Language Charter 1
JARMO LAINIO
Introduction1 Repeated re-drawings of national borders explain the coming into existence of many of the European minority language groups, also in recent times, but in addition migration and globalization have contributed to the development of minority languages. Some support in a positive direction stems from the period of the 1960s, when an ethnic revival movement started evolving globally. The nation-based treatment of minority languages, of both indigenous and migrant languages, varies greatly between the European countries, and has until fairly recently lacked a common view on how to deal with them, legally and politically. During the 20th century attempts to internationally unify the treatment of national minorities and national minority languages2 were initiated from a hu1 1 Iceland has not ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, since no minority languages in the sense of the Charter exist there. Neither has it been part of the present network for minority language pedagogics. As an extension of the Nordic cases, also Danish in Germany has been part of this network’s focus, and is therefore included in the present and other chapters. 2 In the context of the conventions of the CoE the term national minority language has been adopted. It conflates different types of classifications, such as indigenous, historical, traditional or plainly, minority languages.
man rights perspective. However, language rights were more cumbersome to integrate in the rights discussions, than other bases of human rights. There seems to have been a harder resistance to language issues than other rights. For example, Sweden has not, counter to for example the UN Covenant on Human Rights and other international conventions, accepted language as a ground for discrimination, whereas ethnic origin, race, gender and religion have been. Hitherto, the main example of European strivings to support and maintain minority languages, in this case traditional territorial and non-territorial languages, is Council of Europe’s (CoE) European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), sometimes called the Minority Language Charter.3 It is a unique international convention on language, the aim of which is to protect and promote minority languages as part of the cultural heritage of Europe, within the Council of Europe’s member states. At present (2020), 25 states have ratified the Charter. 3 https://www.coe.int/en/web/european-charter-regional-orminority-languages (visited 2019-09-18).
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