Miklós KONTRA
Károli Gáspár University, Budapest, Hungary
(kontra.miklos@kre.hu)
This paper offers a proposal to broaden the study of non-dominant varieties (NDVs) of pluricentric languages through the principled investigation of language rights and Linguistic Human Rights (e.g. Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas 1995, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000).
Examples in support of the proposal will be drawn from European pluricentric languages (Hungarian, Rumanian, Russian, etc.) and will include the role of mother-tongue-medium education in assimilation, access to and equity in education, the role of force or its absence in language shift, and the current (2017) blatant attempt to carry out linguistic genocide in education in Ukraine. Attention will also be called to the need to investigate in detail the historical changes in the formation of NDVs, and the synchronic differences of various speech communities within the same NDV.