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Palgrave Macmillan

Language Rights and the Law in Scandinavia

Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland

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  • © 2023

Overview

  • Studies language policies and laws in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland
  • Assesses how their policies recognize linguistic diversity and accommodate minority language rights
  • Examines the degree of legal protection afforded to indigenous and immigrant linguistic minority groups

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

This book examines the language policies in the constitutions, legal statutes, and regulations of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. In these countries and territories, modern descendants of Old Norse (North Germanic) are spoken today: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. In addition, there are regions of Scandinavia where speakers of minority languages were conquered or incorporated, with their languages suppressed or neglected, as well as recent developments in the status and use of English, and immigrant populations who do not speak a Scandinavian language as their native language. This book adopts a comparative approach to trace the development of language policies and rights in Scandinavia, and it will be of interest to students as well as scholars of European and Scandinavian studies, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, education, political science, and law.

Reviews

“Eduardo Faingold is widely known as an expert on constitutional and legal guarantees of minority language rights across the world. In turning to Scandinavia he is examining countries traditionally sympathetic to minority rights, thereby providing potential models for other countries but also laying bare possible gaps between guarantees on the one hand and practice on the other. This is an important addition to the literature on language policy and language rights.”

—Humphrey Tonkin, University of Hartford, USA

Issues of language diversity, language policy and language planning, and language rights have become of increasing concern to both policy-makers and scholars during the past few decades. There are few academics who have contributed as much to the growing body of scholarship on issues of language rights in particular than has Eduardo Faingold, who has published extensively in this area. This volume, concerned with issues of language rights in Scandinavia, constitutes an important and valuable addition to the literature in the field. Faingold’s insights are clear, cogent, and powerful, and will be of interest to those working in a variety of areas, including not only language policy studies, language planning, and language rights, but also minority and ethnic studies, and of course Scandinavian studies.

—Timothy Reagan, University of Maine, USA/University of the Free State, South Africa

Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Language and Literature, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, USA

    Eduardo D. Faingold

About the author

Eduardo D. Faingold is Professor of Spanish and linguistics at the University of Tulsa, USA.

Bibliographic Information

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