PPE Colloquium: Philippe van Parijs

Philippe van Parijs will give a lecture on February 28th, 3.15pm, on the topic of “Linguistic Justice for Europe and World: an update.” See abstract and title below; given the recent debates about a Redutchification of universities, this is certainly a topic of a lot of interest for us! Andi will be the host of the afternoon and evening, so if you want to join us for dinner, please drop him an email at a.t.schmidt@rug.nl. 

Philipp will also do a Studium Generale event the day before (Tuesday Feb 27, 20.00), which might be of interest for some of you, but about which you can of course also spread the word to a broader audience. See here for the details

Title: Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World: an update

Abstract: The bottom line of Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (published in English in 2011, in German in 2013, in Dutch in 2015) consisted of two main claims: (1) the spreading of English as a lingua franca is desirable and well on its way; and (2) each linguistic community is entitlled to protect its language by imposing its language as the medium of public education and public communication within a territory. Can the first claim be sustained with the same confidence after Brexit, after the AI-driven dramatic improvement of machine translation and interpreting, after the backlash against the Englishization of higher education? Can the second one be sustained with the same innocence after the use made of it in the Ukrainian conflict and in the light of what was learned by the Brussels Council for Multilingualism set up in 2020 by the government ot the Region of Brussels-Capital?