Introduction by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Dr.Phil.
"Visible Signs of Europe: sign languages in a multicultural European Union".E. U. D. Sign Languages Day, 6 December, 2001, European Parliament, Brussels.
1. Number of Languages.
Most linguists say that there are around 6-7,000 languages. The most useful source, The Ethnologue (see www.sil.org/ethnologue/), lists in its latest version over 6,800 languages in 228 countries. But there might be even twice as many: 12-14,000 languages. There are deaf people in all societies, and where hearing people have developed spoken languages, the Deaf have developed Sign languages, fully-fledged, complex, abstract languages (see Branson & Miller 1998, 2000, for brilliant analyses of the treatment of Sign languages; see Alden 2001, Jokinen 2000, Krausneker 1998, Lane 1980, 1992, Skutnabb-Kangas 1994, in press, for the (lack of) L.H.Rs. of Sign language users). Those who speak about "languages" but in fact mean spoken languages only, participate through invisibilising sign languages in killing maybe half the linguistic diversity on earth. Europe is poor on linguistic diversity. [1] If we do not count recent immigrants, we have only some 3% of the world's spoken languages, provided the Russian Federation is counted in (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Chapter 1, for details). The seven most linguistically diverse countries in the world (Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Cameroon, Australia, Mexico), each have more languages than the whole of Europe. Papua New Guinea alone, with some 5 million people, has three times as many languages as Europe, and they use 470 of those languages as the languages of instruction in the first grades of their elementary schools (Klaus, in press). Still, the E. U. prides itself in having linguistic and cultural diversity as a hallmark of Europe.
2. Number of Speakers.
How many users/(native) speakers do the various languages have? Table 2 shows the top twenty languages by population (from The Ethnologue, February 1999). The world's top 10 languages in terms of the number of speakers account for close to 50% of the world's oral population but they represent only 0.10 - 0.15% of the world's spoken languages.
Most of the world's languages are spoken by relatively few people (Table 3). The median number of speakers is probably around 5-6,000 per language (Posey 1997). The 60 languages with more than 10 million speakers taken together account for far over 4 billion people. Over 95% of the world's spoken languages have fewer than 1 million native users. A quarter of the world's spoken languages and most of the Sign languages have fewer than 1,000 users.
3. Languages are more threatened than biodiversity — only 5-10% of the languages left (= unthreatened) in 2100?
Languages are today being murdered faster than ever before in human history, and linguistic diversity is disappearing much faster than biodiversity. A language is threatened if it has few users and a weak political status, and, especially, if children are no longer learning it, i.e., when the language is no longer transmitted to the next generation. Even the most "optimistic realistic" linguists now estimate that half of today's oral languages may have disappeared or at least not be learned by children in a 100 years' time, whereas the "pessimistic but realistic" researchers estimate that we may only have some 10% of today's oral languages (or even 5%, some 300 languages) left as vital, non-threatened languages in the year 2100 (see Krauss 1992).
A comparison of estimates is as follows (Table 4; see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000 for details). Optimistic: 2% of biological species but 50% of languages may be dead (or moribund) in a hundred years' time. Pessimistic: 20% of biological species but 90-95% of languages may be dead (or moribund) in a hundred years' time.
While new trees can be planted and ecological habitats restored, it is much more difficult to restore languages once they have been murdered. What happens is linguistic genocide on a massive scale, with formal education and media as the main concrete culprits but with the world's political, economic and military structures as the more basic causal factors. Big languages turn into killer languages, monsters that gobble up others, when they are learned at the cost of the smaller ones. Instead, they should and could be learned in addition to the various mother tongues.
New research shows that biodiversity and linguistic and cultural diversity are related, both correlationally and causally. [2] Linguistic and biological megadiversity countries overlap to a large extent. Where we have many biological species, mammals, birds, reptiles, amfibians, flowering plants, butterflies, we usually also have many languages (Harmon 1995, in press). But the various types of diversities do also mutually influence and support each other (Posey 1999, Maffi, 2000a, b, 2001, Maffi et al. 1999). Much of the information about the ecological relationships and about how to maintain and use some of the most vulnerable and most biologically rich and diverse environments in the world sustainably is encoded in the many indigenous spoken and signed languages. If these disappear, vital knowledge about the world also disappears: the knowledge is not transferred to the bigger languages that replace the smaller ones (Maffi et al., 1999, Mühlhäusler 1996).
In order to adapt to the massive changes in today's globalisation, we people need more adaptability than ever. Diversity is a prerequisite for this adaptability, for the new ways of coping that we need. I quote from Colin Baker's review of Skutnabb-Kangas 2000 (Baker 2001: 281; see also Crystal 2000, Nettle & Romaine 2000):
Ecological diversity is essential for long-term planetary survival. All living organisms, plants, animals, bacteria and humans survive and prosper through a network of complex and delicate relationships. Damaging one of the elements in the ecosystem will result in unforeseen consequences for the whole of the system. Evolution has been aided by genetic diversity, with species genetically adapting in order to survive in different environments. Diversity contains the potential for adaptation. Uniformity can endanger a species by providing inflexibility and unadaptability. Linguistic diversity and biological diversity are...inseparable. The range of cross fertilisation becomes less as languages and cultures die and the testimony of human intellectual achievement is lessened.In the language of ecology, the strongest ecosystems are those that are the most diverse. That is, diversity is directly related to stability; variety is important for long-term survival. Our success on this planet has been due to an ability to adapt to different kinds of environment over thousands of years (atmospheric as well as cultural). Such ability is born out of diversity. Thus language and cultural diversity maximises chances of human success and adaptability.
If we, during the next 100 years, murder 50-90% of the linguistic (and thereby mostly also the cultural) diversity which is our treasury of historically developed knowledge, we are also seriously undermining our chances of life on earth. Killing linguistic diversity is then, just as the killing of biodiversity, dangerous reductionism. Maximal diversity is our life insurance. And it is especially languages that are maximally different from others that are important to maintain. Relatively speaking, therefore, Sign languages may, because of their differences from spoken languages, contain more so far untapped important information for our futures than many of the spoken languages, especially the big ones.
4. Linguistic Genocide in Education.
Multilingualism is a prerequisite for the maintenance of linguistic diversity because speakers of small languages of course need to learn bigger languages also. Therefore, high levels of multilingualism should be among the most important goals in all formal and informal education. But so far, formal education has been the most important direct agent in killing indigenous and minority languages, by forcibly transferring minority language children to dominant language groups and by preventing children from developing their full cognitive potential in situations where minority children do not understand the language of instruction. This fits the U. N. definitions on linguistic and cultural genocide, according to Articles II (e) and (b) of the U. N. International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (E793, 1948):
Article II (e), "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group"; and Article II (b), "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" (emphasis added).
Likewise, most minority education is guilty of linguistic genocide according to the 1948 special definition (not part of the present Convention).
Article III (1) "Prohibiting the use of the language of the group in daily intercourse or in schools, or the printing and circulation of publications in the language of the group".
For oral minority students education through the medium of a dominant majority language leads to the students using the dominant language with their own children later on (e.g., Janulf 1998), i.e., over a generation or two the children are linguistically and often in other ways too forcibly transferred to a dominant group; they are linguistically and culturally assimilated. The transfer to the majority language speaking group happens by force; it is not voluntary. For it to be voluntary, alternatives should exist, namely schools or classes which teach mainly through the medium of the threatened indigenous or minority languages. And parents would need to have enough reliable information about the long-term consequences of the various choices. None of these conditions are usually fulfilled for indigenous or minority parents and children, i.e., the situations where children lose their first language, can often be characterised as genocide (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000 for these claims). Since most Deaf children are born to hearing parents, their situation is different here, though. Parents and children do not have the same mother tongue, and many of the Deaf children are in their turn going to have hearing children. In Table 5, I compare the forcible transfer that happens in education for two groups: oral indigenous or minority children who are taught through the medium of a dominant or majority language, and Deaf children of hearing parents who are taught through oral methods, i.e., taught lip-reading and speaking in a dominant majority language, to the exclusion of a Sign language. This is the predominant method in oralism. Oralism is still a dominant feature in the teaching of Deaf children in most countries, even if a few do receive bilingual education with Sign language as one of the languages of instruction. [3]
Cochlear implants may also come under the forcible transfer of children to another group — this is as yet unclarified. There is also a wealth of research and statistics about the mental harm that forced assimilation causes in education and otherwise (see, e.g., Baugh 1996, 2000, Jordan 1988, Kouritzin 1998, Wong Fillmore 1991, Skutnabb-Kangas 1984, 2000). As most Deaf people would be prepared to witness, assimilationist submersion education where minorities are taught through the medium of dominant languages, where for instance Deaf students are taught orally only and where Sign languages have no place in the curriculum, often causes mental harm, including serious prevention or delay of cognitive growth potential. For Deaf children the harm caused is obviously still much greater than for oral children, since trying to force Deaf children to become oral only, to the exclusion of Sign languages and preventing them from fully developing a Sign language in formal education, deprives them of the chance of learning through this education the only type of language through which they can fully express themselves. Since they do not share this mother tongue with their parents, they are completely dependent on formal education to really develop it to the highest possible level. As a result, Deaf researchers claim that many Deaf people do not have proper command of any language (e.g., Markku Jokinen, personal communication, 22 November, 2001). [4]
All forms of genocide are crimes against humanity. Oralism in formal education is an instance of linguistic genocide. Therefore, oralism in the formal education of Deaf children is a crime against humanity.
Educational L.H.Rs. which guarantee additive language learning are needed for preventing linguistic genocide and for linguistic diversity to be maintained on earth.
5. Linguistic Human Rights as a possible counterweight?
The right to mother tongue medium education is the most important linguistic human right if we are interested in maintaining linguistic and cultural diversity on our planet.
But even the most recent human rights instruments are completely insufficient in guaranteeing the most important linguistic human rights, not only to Deaf and Sign language users but to linguistic minorities in general. International and European binding Covenants, Conventions and Charters give very little support to linguistic human rights in education (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1994). Language receives in them a much poorer treatment than other central human characteristics. Often, language disappears completely in binding educational paragraphs; for instance, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) where the paragraph on education (26) does not refer to language at all. Similarly, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted in 1966 and in force since 1976), having mentioned language on a par with race, colour, sex, religion, etc. in its general Article (2.2), omits reference to language or linguistic groups in its educational Article (13.1):
...education shall enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society, promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial, ethnic or religious groups... (emphasis added).
When language IS in educational paragraphs of human rights instruments, the Articles dealing with education, especially the right to mother tongue medium education, are more vague and/or contain many more opt-outs and modifications than any other Articles (see, e.g., Kontra et al., eds., 1999; Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994, 1995, 1996; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996a, b, 1999, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1994, 1997, 1998). I will show you just one example of how language in education gets a different treatment from everything else, from the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities from 1992 (adopted by the General Assembly in December 1992), most of the Articles use the obligating formulation "shall" and have few let-out modifications or alternatives — except where linguistic rights in education are concerned. Compare the unconditional formulation in Article 1 about identity, with the education Article 4.3: 1.1. States shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their respective territories, and shall encourage conditions for the promotion of that identity.1.2. States shall adopt appropriate legislative and other measures to achieve those ends.4.3. States should take appropriate measures so that, wherever possible, persons belonging to minorities have adequate opportunities to learn their mother tongue or to have instruction in their mother tongue. (Emphases added, "obligating" in italics, "opt-outs" in bold type).
The same types of formulation as in Art. 4.3 abound even in the latest H.Rs. instruments. Minority languages, and sometimes even their speakers, MIGHT, "as far as possible", and "within the framework of [the State's] education systems", receive some vaguely defined rights, or "appropriate measures", or "adequate opportunities", "if there is sufficient demand" and "substantial numbers", or "pupils who so wish in a number considered sufficient", or "if the number of users of a regional or minority language justifies it". All these examples come from the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, both in force since 1999. The Articles covering medium of education are so heavily qualified that the minority is completely at the mercy of the state (see also Thornberry 1997). It is clear that the opt-outs and alternatives in the Convention and the Charter permit a reluctant state to meet the requirements in a minimalist way, which it can legitimate by claiming that a provision was not "possible" or "appropriate", or that numbers were not "sufficient" or did not "justify" a provision, or that it "allowed" the minority to organise teaching of their language as a subject, at their own cost.
Still, the human rights system should protect people in the globalisation process rather than giving market forces free range. Human rights, especially economic and social rights, are, according to human rights lawyer Katarina Toma_evski (1996: 104), to act as correctives to the free market. Toma_evski claims (ibid., 104) that the purpose of international human rights law is...to overrule the law of supply and demand and remove price tags from people and from necessities for their survival.
These necessities for survival include not only basic food, health and housing but also basics for the sustenance of a dignified life, including basic civil, political and cultural rights. Cultural rights include full linguistic human rights. Of course the rights need to be binding, there must be a duty-holder, and both a monitoring system and a proper complaint system need to be in place, with some kind of penalties for non-compliance. There are some recent positive developments (I list some of them in Note 5, below) but no results are in sight yet, and there is little reason to be optimistic.
Summing up, then, learning new languages should be additive rather than subtractive. Education should add to people's linguistic repertoires. So far, human rights instruments and discussions about both them and about educational language rights have not even started addressing these big questions in a coherent way where all types of ecology would be discussed within an integrated political and economic framework. When speakers of small languages learn other, necessary, languages in addition to their native languages, they become multilingual, and the maintenance of linguistic diversity, necessary for the planet, is supported. When dominant languages, like English, are learned subtractively, at the cost of the mother tongues, they become killer languages.
References:
Alden, Brice (2001). Visualist Theory 2001. Manuscript (hometown.aol.com/Alair38/vis.htm).
Baker, Colin (2001). Review of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas Linguistic genocide in education - or worldwide diversity and human rights? Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5:2, May 2001, 279-283.
Baugh, John (1996). "Linguistic Discrimination". In Kontaktlinguistik. (Contact Linguistics. Linguistique de contact). Ein Internationales Handbuch zeitgenössiger Forschung. An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Manuel international des recherches contemporaines. Volume 1. Goebl, Hans, Nelde, Peter H., Star_, Zden_k & Wölck, Wolfgang (eds.), Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 709-714.
Baugh, John (2000). "Educational Malpractice and the Miseducation of Language Minority Students". In Hall, Joan Kelly & Eggington, William G. (eds.). The Sociopolitics of English Language Teaching. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 104-116.
Branson, Jan & Miller, Don (1998). "Nationalism and the linguistic rights of Deaf communities: linguistic imperialism and the recognition and development of sign languages". Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2:1, 1998, 3-34.
Branson, Jan and Miller, Don (2000). "Maintaining, Developing and Sharing the Knowledge and Potential Embedded in all our Languages and Cultures: on linguists as agents of epistemic violence". In Phillipson (ed.), 28-32.
Crystal, David (2000). Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harmon, David (1995). "The status of the world's languages as reported in The Ethnologue". Southwest Journal of Linguistics 14:1&2, 1-28.
Harmon, David (in press). In Light of Our Differences: how diversity in nature and culture makes us human. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institute Press.
Janulf, Pirjo (1998). "Kommer finskan i Sverige att fortleva? En studie av språkkunskaper och språkanvändning hos andragenerationens sverigefinnar i Botkyrka och hos finlandssvenskar i Åbo". (Will Finnish survive in Sweden? A study of language skills and language use among second generation Sweden Finns in Botkyrka, Sweden, and Finland Swedes in Åbo, Finland). Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Studia Fennica Stockholmiensia 7. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Jokinen, Markku (2000). "The linguistic human rights of Sign language users". In Phillipson (ed.), 203-213.
Jordan, Deirdre (1988). "Rights and claims of indigenous people. Education and the reclaiming of identity: the case of the Canadian natives, the Saami and Australian Aborigines". In Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Cummins, Jim (Eds.). Minority education: from shame to struggle. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 189-222.
Klaus, David (in press). "The use of indigenous languages in early basic education in Papua New Guinea: a model for elsewhere?" To appear in Language and Education. An International Journal.
Kontra, Miklós, Phillipson, Robert, Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Várady, Tibor (eds.) (1999). Language: a right and a resource. Approaching Linguistic Human Rights. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Kouritzin, Sandra (1999). Face[t]s of first language loss. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Krausneker, Verena (1998). Sign Languages in the Minority Languages Policy of the European Union. M.A. Thesis, September 1998. Vienna: University of Vienna.
Krauss, Michael (1992). "The World's Languages in Crisis". Language, 68:1, 4-10.
Lane, Harlan (1980). "A Chronology of the Oppression of Sign Language in France and the United States". In Lane, Harlan & Grosjean, François (eds.). Recent Perspectives on American Sign Language. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 119-161.
Lane, Harlan (1992). The Mask of Benevolence: disabling the Deaf community. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Maffi, Luisa (2000a). "Linguistic and Biological Diversity: the inextricable link". In Phillipson (ed.), 17-22.
Maffi, Luisa (2000b). "Language preservation vs. language maintenance and revitalization: assessing concepts, approaches, and implications for language sciences". International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 142. Dorian, Nancy C. (ed.). Small languages and small language communities, 175-190.
Maffi, Luisa, Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Andrianarivo, Jonah (1999). "Language diversity". In Posey (ed.), 19-57.
Maffi, Luisa (ed.) (2001). On Biocultural Diversity. Linking Language, Knowledge and the Environment. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institute Press.
Mühlhäusler, Peter (1996). Linguistic ecology. Language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London: Routledge.
Nettle, Daniel & Romaine, Suzanne (2000). Vanishing Voices. The Extinction of the World's Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Phillipson, Robert (ed.) (2000). Rights to language. Equity, Power and Education. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Phillipson, Robert & Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1994). "English — Panacea or Pandemic?" In Ammon, Ulrich, Mattheier, Klaus J. & Nelde, Peter (eds.). Sociolinguistica 8. English only? in Europa/ in Europe/ en Europe, 73-87.
Phillipson, Robert & Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1995). "Linguistic rights and wrongs". Applied Linguistics, 16: 4, 483-504.
Phillipson, Robert & Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1996). "English Only Worldwide, or Language Ecology". T.E.S.O.L. Quarterly. Ricento, Thomas & Hornberger, Nancy (eds). Special-Topic Issue — Language Planning and Policy, 429-452.
Posey, Darrell (ed.) (1999). Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity. A Complementary Contribution to the Global Biodiversity Assessment. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, for and on behalf of the United Nations Environmental Programme.
Price, Glanville (ed.) (2000). Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe. London: Blackwell.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1984). Bilingualism or not — the education of minorities. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1994). "Linguistic Human Rights: a prerequisite for bilingualism". In Ahlgren, Inger & Hyltenstam, Kenneth (Eds.). Bilingualism in Deaf Education, International Studies on Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf, Vol. 27, Hamburg: Signum, 139-159.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1996a). "The colonial legacy in educational language planning in Scandinavia — from migrant labour to a national ethnic minority?" International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Vol. 118. Special Issue — Language Planning and Political Theory, Dua, Hans (ed.), 81-106.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1996b). "Educational language choice — multilingual diversity or monolingual reductionism?" In Hellinger, Marlis & Ammon, Ulrich (eds). Contrastive Sociolinguistics. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 175-204.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (1999). "Linguistic diversity, human rights and the 'free' market". In Kontra et al. (eds), 187-222.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (2000). Linguistic genocide in education - or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, N.J. & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove (in press). "Sprache und Menschenrechte (Language and Human Rights)". Das Zeichen.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Phillipson, Robert (1994). "Linguistic human rights, past and present". In Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson (eds.), 71-110.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Phillipson, Robert (1997). "Linguistic Human Rights and Development". In Hamelink, Cees J. (ed.). Ethics and Development. On Making Moral Choices in Development Co-operation. Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok. S. 56-69.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Phillipson, Robert (1998). "Linguistic human rights". In Hamelink, Cees J. (ed.). Gazette. The International Journal for Communication Studies. Special volume — Human Rights 60: 1, 27-46.
Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove & Phillipson, Robert (eds., in collaboration with Mart Rannut) (1994). "Linguistic Human Rights. Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination". Contributions to the Sociology of Language, 67. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Thornberry, Patrick (1997). "Minority Rights". In Academy of European Law, (ed.). Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law. Volume VI, Book 2. The Netherlands: Kluwer Law International, 307-390.
Toma_evski, Katarina (1996). "International prospects for the future of the welfare state". In Reconceptualizing the welfare state. Copenhagen: The Danish Centre for Human Rights, 100-117.
Wong Fillmore, Lily (1991). "When Learning a Second Language Means Losing the First". Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6, 323-346.
Notes:
1. The most recent book on the languages of Europe (Price 2000), describes some 275 languages, some of them extinct.
2. "Terralingua: partnerships for linguistic and biological diversity () is an "international organization devoted to preserving the world's linguistic diversity and investigating links between biological and cultural diversity". See our Web site for details of the claims.
3. Markku Jokinen (personal communication, 22 November, 2001) assesses that maybe one or two percent of the world's Deaf children receive bilingual education. In Europe this is true in the Nordic countries, with some experiments or single schools in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain. See also E.U.D. monthly updates, especially March & April 2001.
4. Many other linguistic human rights are, of course, also important for Sign language users. There are many other linguistic barriers, in relation to access to information, media, services, employment, etc. An international hearing in the Hague in May 1999 about the linguistic rights of several groups, among them the Deaf, concluded that "there is clear evidence of violations of basic linguistic human rights of the Deaf all over the world. Š The judges urge governments to consider granting full rights to Sign languages as official languages and to offer real bilingual education and public services to the Deaf". The judgement and summaries of the testimonies of the key witnesses have been published as a short monograph, called Linguicide. The Death of Language (1999). It is also available at and http://www.waag.org/pcc. Number 4, 1999, of the journal Media Development, is a special number on language rights, and it also summarises the Hearing.
5. Examples of positive recent human rights instruments, draft instruments, recommendations, declarations or comments:
1) U.N., Human Rights Committee: General Comment on U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 27 (4 April 1996, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.5).2) U.N., Working Group on Indigenous Populations: Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; www.unhchr.ch/html/menu4/subres/9445.htm.3) C.I.E.M.E.N. (Mercator Programme, Linguistic Rights and Law); The International Pen Club (Committee for Translation and Linguistic Rights): The draft Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (handed over to U.N.E.S.C.O. in June 1997); www.troc.es/ciemen/mercator/index-gb.htm.4) The Third World Network, Malaysia; The Cultural Environment Movement, U.S.A.; and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, A.M.A.R.C.: People's Communication Charter (including an International Hearing on Language Rights, in May 1999, in the Hague; www.waag.org/pcc.5) O.S.C.E., High Commissioner on National Minorities: The Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities & Explanatory Note; www.osce.org/.6) The 1997 Harare Declaration from an O.A.U. (Organisation for African Unity) Conference of Ministers on Language Policies in Africa.7) The Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures, 17 Jan., 2000 ; www.outreach.psu.edu/C&I/AllOdds/declaration.html.
