Ingrid Piller, Linguistic Justice - what is it and how can it be achieved? Keynote lecture #ICML2021
Channel: Language on the Move
Date: 2021-03-24

Linguistic Justice - what is it and how can it be achieved?

Keynote lecture by Professor Ingrid Piller at the 18th International Conference on Minority Languages, March 24-26, 2021, Bilbao, Basque Country, https://icml2021.eus/?lang=en

There is no normative universally agreed upon definition of linguistic justice. But we all recognize linguistic injustice. Linguistic justice is thus the overcoming of injustice.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep injustices in crisis communication in linguistically diverse societies. Information may be inaccessible to minoritized people because it is in a language they are not proficient in, and/or in the written medium in low-literacy contexts, and/or provided through digital channels in low-technology contexts.

The provision of translation seems like one way to overcome linguistic injustice but over-reliance on translations is problematic because the translation may not be locally appropriate and  language choice is often haphazard. Translation usually provides static information only and is often of low quality (including machine translation provision). Information architectures designed following a monolingual logic constitute another accessibility problem, as does information overload.

Institutions at all levels need holistically designed linguistically inclusive communication strategies meeting the needs of linguistically diverse stakeholders. The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a unique opportunity to put such linguistically inclusive communication policies in place.