Language rights for ‘new minorities’: an inclusive perspective on linguistic diversity in Europe

In the last few decades, it has been increasingly debated whether new minorities’ heritage languages should be granted a similar level of protection as old minorities’ languages. However, a lack of interdisciplinary dialogue has led to confusion regarding terminological distinctions. Furthermore, there have been few analyses of which lessons can be drawn from minority rights regimes implemented for ‘old minorities’ at the state level, inspiring the development of new solutions that respond to the case-specific issues raised by ‘new minorities’. Indeed, although it is crucial to highlight what these issues are, many studies, however, have adopted rather paternalistic ‘top-down’ approaches, thus formulating the claims of ‘new minorities’ without their direct involvement. The thesis illustrates a path towards a more inclusive system of language protection and promotion that includes the languages of ‘new minorities’ and embraces multilingualism as an inevitable characteristic of post-modern societies. To this end, it firstly reorganises the debate on ‘language rights for new minorities’ by identifying and answering some preliminary questions common to different disciplines. Secondly, it identifies heritage language speakers’ attitudes towards heritage language maintenance and multilingualism through a set of structured and semi-structured interviews with ‘representatives’ of the ‘new minority’ category in order to provide a much more focused analysis of already implemented solutions and their potential transferability to new contexts. Thirdly, it constructs a set of ‘significant practices’ in the field of language rights and policies based on these relevant solutions and their link to the specific needs and claims of ‘new minorities’. Overall, it advocates an interdisciplinary, inclusive and integrated approach to linguistic diversity in Europe.