This month’s feature is contributed by the co-chairs of the Global Coalition for Language Rights, Lucio Bagnulo, Veronica Costea, and Gerald Roche. They introduce our readers to an exciting and much needed initiative.
The early period of the covid pandemic was a strange time of simultaneous isolation and connectivity, as we all bunkered down at home and shifted our lives online. It was during this time that a group of language advocates got together (virtually of course) to form the Global Coalition for Language Rights (GCLR), with the simple mission of promoting language rights for all people.
GCLR pursues this mission by raising awareness of language rights in general, and of the specific challenges that people and communities in different places face in relation to language rights. And, since our coalition members already aim to promote language rights in their own work in various ways, we also aim to support each other by sharing our knowledge and skills with one another.
Coalition members currently include a wide range of individuals and organizations: professional translators, activists, advocates, and academics whose work intersects with language in a variety of ways. This diversity of membership—crossing a range of sectors and bringing together people with very different approaches, experiences, and skills—enables us to support and learn from each other.
One of the coalition’s key activities is the Global Language Advocacy Day (GLAD). We held our first Global Language Advocacy Day on February 22nd, 2022, aiming to boost a simple message: ‘language rights are human rights.’ Coalition members organized thirteen different local events in six countries, bringing people together to discuss language rights. We also coordinated a social media campaign across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and got our message out through traditional media and online forums, including the coalition’s own blog, helping to bring awareness of language rights to thousands of people. Currently, we are planning the 2023 Global Language Advocacy Day under the theme of ‘language rights save lives.’
GCLR also raises awareness of language rights throughout the year by participating in other public events, such as RightsCon and International Translation Day. Any member of the coalition can propose initiatives that contribute to the coalition’s goals, and we then pursue these by forming temporary working groups that disband once their task has been completed.
To give some idea of our activities, one of these working groups is currently working on a declaration of language rights: a short statement outlining what language rights are in clear, accessible language. Our aim is to translate this declaration into as many languages as possible for the Global Language Advocacy Day in 2023. Having worked out a draft of the declaration, we have now translated it into eleven languages, and will soon begin road-testing it on social media, so we can collect feedback and revise the declaration before formally launching it on the Global Language Advocacy Day 2023.
As part of our broader efforts to raise awareness about the importance of language rights, in 2022 we started issuing public statements in response to pertinent events. We released our first statement following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Members of the coalition were concerned with how the invasion was being justified with reference to language rights: Russia claimed to be protecting the rights of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. We therefore issued a trilingual statement, in Russian, Ukrainian, and English, expressing our stance that language rights should never be used to justify state violence. We also collated and published translation resources for people impacted by the war in Ukraine. The coalition has since issued a second statement, again in multiple languages, in response to news that prisons in the US state of Michigan were denying prisoners access to printed materials in languages other than English.
Our work to promote and raise awareness of language rights is growing as the coalition grows, and new members bring new ideas for how we can and should work. One of the key challenges we are currently working on is how to embed our mission within the organization itself: how can we promote language rights within the coalition and move beyond an English-only model? We are also working to ensure that we live up to the ‘global’ part of our name by recruiting members from a wide range of locations and contexts.
We are always happy to welcome new members to the coalition, and invite you to join us and help contribute to our mission of language rights for all people.