More than forty percent of the world’s 6,700 languages are in danger of disappearing by the end of this century. Like biodiversity, language loss has been attributed to environment degradation, developmentalism, and the destruction of Indigenous communities. Unlike biodiversity, however, linguistic diversity is defended as a matter of democratic inclusiveness, human rights, and egalitarianism. Can we demand language justice the way others have demanded environmental justice, economic justice, and social justice? The goal of this panel is to explore this question and help reframe our conversation about what it means to talk about linguistic diversity while centering ecological and planetary concerns.

The scope of the problem demands that we work across scale to address justice on planetary terms. For recognizing the diversity of human languages—always in the plural—is to recognize this diversity as intrinsic to the larger ecological, political, and socioeconomic processes that cut across developed and developing societies. To explore language diversity requires reckoning with the persistence of injustice, our conceptions of justice, and their limitations: Are the demands for linguistic, economic, and ecological justice interlinked, conflictual, or interdependent at fundamental levels? Furthermore, as Phillip Van Parijs asks in Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World, "Is linguistic diversity valuable in itself or as an important means for something else we value?".

The focus of this panel is not the endangerment of Indigenous languages and their preservation, a task that others have pursued with vision and skill. Rather, this panel seeks to connect various areas of study that have previously limited their scope to single policies, such as discriminatory public policies, unjust social practices in education, and unequal distributions of language-based resources (i.e. access to digital technology, health care, and social services in general). We will explore the interconnected loci of socioeconomic changes that accelerate the decline and death of indigenous languages but which might also give rise to new possibilities through population movement, technological innovation, and social transformation. With these questions in mind, we begin to reflect upon some of the core concerns of global language justice.

L. Maria Bo will begin the panel by taking a critical look at the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights (1996). From the start, linguistic rights were conceived to cover everything from communication to poetic speech but – like all rights – they have always had to be translated to hold universal significance. Bo explores whether the political notion of equal rights can hold when the translations thereof turn out to be unequal, thus undermining fundamental Western political concepts even while they are being articulated. Using the work of Western Sioux philosopher Vine Deloria, Jr., Bo critiques the Enlightenment conflation of equality with justice. Instead, examining equality's unequal translations in the UDLR charts new paths to justice by redefining our freedoms, so that language can become the source of its own emancipation.

Emily Apter will follow with “Translating Ecosophy”. The term écosophie – a conflation of ecology and philosophy – was coined in 1973 and reworked by Félix Guattari in the 1980s-90s. For Guattari, écosophie was a critical concept, warding off the tendency in the ecology movements of his time to “turn the defense of species into a kind of identity nature politics” too easily turned to conservative ends. Exploring the term’s application to Schmitt’s “nomos of the earth” (its emphasis on the gridding of the world, land division, and sovereign jurisdiction), complicates the politics of linguistic diversity and contemporary language justice movements. Ecosophie/ecosophy is cast as an anchor term for glossaries of environmental justice that aim to undercut colonial epistemologies and monolingual idioms of climate-speak.

Finally, Lydia H. Liu will examine how the digital divide impacts linguistic diversity in our hyperconnected world where the digital presence of a language is becoming crucial, if not necessary, for its survival into the future. Having a digital presence means that the script of a given language must be included in Unicode, with fonts and keyboards designed and made available to users who can easily type, search, and send written materials across the platforms. Not having a digital presence in Unicode will prevent younger generations of a language from using their script on digital devices, in time leading to what some critics call digital language death. Drawing on scholarly work on script encoding, global lingua franca, and digital vitality, Liu’s paper explores the techne of script making in contemporary society and its implications for the life and death of Indigenous and marginalized languages.